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 number k of 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.