Starting from Egyptian blue in ancient times, pigments preferred by painters for sky blue have changed repeatedly. Here’s a brief history.
colour
Grisaille – grey underpainting used to set the tone for a finished work – is like underwear, waiting for richly coloured clothes to go on top. Not in these paintings, though.
What could be a valuable collections of tools for working with colour has been sadly neglected, and left to grow weeds and bugs.
Why are women sometimes shown as having very pale skin? Why did they apply cosmetics to make their faces whiter? Ask the ancient Egyptians.
The experience of colour in our buildings, indoor environments, clothing and objects we look at has changed. What used to be a privilege of class is now all but universal.
Well known from language, the scarlet woman should be easy to read in paintings. But all that is scarlet isn’t who you’d expect.
An introduction to colourspaces, gamuts, and how images are rendered in colour, so that what you see on your display or in a print looks right.
In some populations, as many as one in ten men has significant colour vision deficiency. What effect does that have on how they perceive paintings?
In the early 20th century, painters started using intense colours, often raw from the tube, and those shifted to give green flesh and blue horses.
A journey through some visual illusions show how a simple physical concept of human colour vision doesn’t work. It’s all about perception, not physics.
The Eclectic Light Company 