Getting Started With A Digital Color Reference Tool For Fantasy Series
There are a few fan-made resources floating around for Keeper of the Lost Cities, and most of them are poorly maintained or riddled with bugs. The one that actually works as intended is the Books Keeper Of The Lost Cities Everblaze Itpalette. It is a digital color and character reference palette built by someone who clearly read the books multiple times rather than just skimming summaries. If you are a writer, artist, or worldbuilder working in this universe, it can save you from consistency mistakes that would otherwise creep into your projects. The palette organizes canon-accurate colors for the Everblaze series — skin tones for telepaths, fire color gradients, elf clothing references, and even some of the less obvious ones like the specific shade of green used in the Fae realm descriptions. It is not an official product. Shannon Messenger did not commission it. That does not mean it is garbage, because the creator cross-referenced multiple editions and included source citations for each entry. Most other similar tools skip that step entirely. I used it when illustrating a series of character reference sheets for a personal project. The first time I opened the file, I noticed the hex codes were grouped by emotion-response color shifts rather than by character name. That is actually more useful than a simple alphabetical list. You can look up how a character's aura changes when they are angry versus calm, which is something the books mention several times but never assign a specific color to. The creator inferred these from textual clues and marked them as estimated values.
How It Actually Works In Practice
Download the palette file from the creator's thread on the main fan forum. It is usually pinned or linked from the resources section. Do not pay anyone asking for a "premium" version. The full palette is free. There is no paywall and never has been. Some resellers try to gatekeep it by re-uploading to their own drives, but the original is publicly accessible. The file comes in two formats. One is a CSV spreadsheet with hex codes, RGB values, and book citation references. The other is an ASE file you can import directly into Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint, or Krita. If you use Procreate, the CSV works fine. Import it manually through your color picker. The process takes about three minutes total. Here is where things get tricky. The CSV uses a semi-colon delimiter instead of a comma in some versions. If you try to import it into Excel or Google Sheets and everything collapses into a single column, open the file in Notepad first and replace all semicolons with commas. I spent twenty minutes debugging that before realizing the delimiter was the issue. The creator mentioned this in a follow-up comment but buried it three pages down in the thread. Check the last five replies before assuming the file is corrupted.
What Beginners Miss
Most people treat the palette as a simple color lookup. That is not how you get the most out of it. The real value is in the cross-character comparison tables. There is a sheet that overlays the skin tone ranges for different elf lineages — Tel'Emess, Vulis'Kara, Lirren — showing how their canonical tones differ. If you have ever drawn characters and gotten comments that they look like they belong to the wrong family, this is why. The book series distinguishes these subtly, and a palette built by someone who tracked those distinctions is worth keeping on hand. Another thing nobody mentions: the Everblaze fire gradient entries include intermediate states. The books describe the flames shifting through multiple hues during emotional intensity spikes, and the palette breaks those into seven discrete steps rather than a simple red-to-orange transition. This matters if you are rendering any scene where a character is channeling significant power. The default gradient most artists use is wrong for high-intensity sequences.
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The Limitations You Need To Know
The palette does not cover every book in the series equally. The later volumes introduce new color references — things like the Shadow Realm palettes and the Nihility-based effects — that are either missing or labeled as incomplete. The creator added a note saying those sections were still being researched, but as of the last update, roughly thirty percent of Volume 7 content is still unmapped. If you need accuracy for the newer books, supplement with screenshots from the official illustrations or your own notes. There is also no unified index for searching by keyword. You have to browse by category or open the raw CSV and filter manually. If you need to find a specific color quickly — say, the exact tone of Foxfire's hair — you will spend more time searching than you save. I wrote a simple Python script that indexes the CSV and lets me query by character name or keyword. It takes about ten lines of code and runs instantly. If you are comfortable with that, it is worth doing. If not, the manual browsing is manageable if you know which category a given element falls under. Another practical issue: the ASE file does not preserve category grouping in most drawing applications. When you load it into your software, all colors appear in a single flat swatch. The categories only exist in the CSV metadata. So while the organization is useful for reference, it disappears once imported. You can recreate the groups manually in your app, but that requires opening the CSV alongside your drawing software. It is a minor workflow friction point, but it adds up over long sessions.
If you are looking for something more comprehensive that covers the entire series uniformly, there is no better fan-made alternative that I have found. The other resources tend to be either outdated from 2019 or incomplete guesswork. This one is the closest thing to a reliable reference document that exists outside official publications. Use it, verify the entries you care about most against the source text, and keep the CSV as your primary reference. The visual file is convenient but secondary.
