The problem of describing texture colours in a concise way is analysed. This problem is formulated as a colour quantisation problem, where the texture image is quantised using the smallest numberkof representative colours given some criteria. These colours are the texture characteristic colours, and an algorithm is proposed to obtain them. It is shown that a network of simple processing elements implements a generalisation of the algorithm that outperforms it in many cases. Some applications of the proposed approach are colour texture discrimination and classification.