Question

I am working on a simple program to just draw circles around some fixed points using the Python turtle package; however, I wanted to make it somewhat like a heat map where the colors get “cooler” as they get farther from the original point. My idea was to take the base white color, #FFFFFF, and subtract a percentage based from that on the distance away.

I assumed hex color codes worked by getting lower in its hex value as the color gets “cooler”, but I have now read that the first two mean its red value, the second its green, and the last its blue. How would I go around implementing a heat map the way I want it to work?

I’m confident the distances are correct, I just think I’m using the color codes in the wrong way. The function I wrote to do the color calculation:

def findColor(dist):
    base = "FFFFFF"
    num = int(base, 16)
    percent = dist/800 #800 is the max distance away
    newNum = (num - (num*percent))
    color = hex(int(newNum))
    return color

The resulting map I get is:

With Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams’ help about HSV, I’ve got it looking like this 🙂 :

Answer 1

You want to use HSV instead of RGB for the colors; slide across the hue dimension for your distances. colorsys can help.