For once, my question is short and simple: How do I use a beamer defined color in a tikz picture.

For instance, as beamer's documentation states, using beamer's colors is done as follows:

This text is {\usebeamercolor[fg]{alerted text} alerted}.
The following box uses the fore- and background of frametitles:
   \colorbox{bg}{Frame Title}

I would like to use the background color of the titleframe to fill an arrow shape as follows:

  \node[fill=\color{bg},single arrow] at (0,0) { };

Anyone has a clue? I'm being scold by xcolors:

! Argument of \XC@col@rlet has an extra }.


TikZ can use the color names provided by \usebeamercolor directly, you don't need to pass them to \color{...} first. Simply use color=fg for the foreground color, color=bg for the background, and so on:


\frametitle{A Frame}
  \fill [fill=fg] (0,0) circle [radius=2cm];
  • 1
    Nice! I didn't suspect how simple this was! TY – MP0 Jun 20 '12 at 9:24
  • 3
    This solution works perfect within beamer because you can change beamer theme and keep color scheme but if you plan to later write a beamerarticle with same code it will fail. beamerarticle doesn't know about beamer colors. – Ignasi Jun 20 '12 at 9:31
  • 3
    @Ignasi: Good point! For that application you could define a custom command \newcommand{\usebeamercolor}[1]{\definecolor{fg}{rgb}{<whatever>}} that sets the required colors. – Jake Jun 20 '12 at 9:36

Your Answer

