Brendan and Alister, thank you both for responding. I am very inexperienced with python, but not new to computers so on my own I realized the strings vs number mistake. (I seem to work with and learn about Python for a few weeks at a time with 6 to 12 months in between. Need to change that and focus on it for awhile.) After my first error I removed the quotation marks from my variables knowing that strings vs numbers was involved. I copied and pasted from my original script when I showed it to you. Opps. Anyway, I had no idea how to expand tuples nor that it was not done automatically.
Thank you you both for sharing that info. After making variables numbers by removing the quotes and putting an asterisk in front of my colour1, colour2, etc variables whenever I passed them to a function in order to expand them, the error messages disappeared. It appears to work just fine now. Thanks. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list