Pitchy Canary
Pitchy Canary (#2E2F0D) is a deep yellow with a warm character. It leans warm, pulling light toward red, orange, and yellow. Naturally inviting, it suits editorial and hospitality contexts. Its HSL profile (62°, 57%, 12%) places it in the balanced band at a dark lightness. It works well as a headline, icon, or deep background in an otherwise light layout, pairing cleanly with cream, bone, and warm neutrals. For a confident two-color system, pair it with its complementary blue. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old English pic, pitch — adjectival suffix -y. As a color modifier, pitchy implies the deep-glossy-black quality of bitumen-and-pine-pitch viscous-residue surfaces, particularly the Norse-and-Viking longship-pine-tar caulking. Sits at the deepest-warm end of the grid, parallel to tarry and warmer than Stygian.
The domesticated Serinus canaria, bred in the Canary Islands and exported to European cages from the seventeenth century. The wild bird is greenish; centuries of selective breeding produced the saturated yellow of the modern canary. The color is the breast feathers of a yellow domestic canary: a clean, bright yellow with the slight orange shift of carotenoid pigment in feathers, identical chemistry to the carotenes in flamingo plumage.
Closest matches
The nearest named color in three reference sources, ranked by perceptual distance (ΔE76 in CIELAB). ΔE < 1 is imperceptible to most viewers; ΔE > 10 is clearly different. When two sources point to the same hex they’re merged into one tile; click any to open that color’s page.
Variations
Click any swatch to exploreHarmonies
Accessibility
How this color appears to viewers with the four major color-vision-deficiency types. Computed via the Machado (2009) physiologically-based model. If a tile matches the original, the color reads the same to that viewer.
The color used as foreground text against pure white and pure black, with the contrast ratio and WCAG 2.1 grade. Aim for AA (4.5:1) for body text and AA Large (3:1) for 18 pt+ headlines; AAA (7:1) is the gold standard for long-form reading surfaces.
Wide gamut
The CSS Color 4 wide-gamut form of this color. Both swatches render the same color on every display — the P3 form only diverges from sRGB when a designer pushes channels outside sRGB's reach.
This color sits well within the sRGB cube. P3 and sRGB share the gray axis and most desaturated tones, so a P3 display renders this identically to an sRGB display.