Colour

The glass that changes colour

Sand, soda, fire and a trace of precious metal. Roman glassmakers made a cup that changes colour when the light moves, and for sixteen centuries nobody...

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Vantablack and the licence that started a colour war

How a coating built for space cameras ended up licensed to one sculptor for art, and how Stuart Semple answered with a pink anyone could buy...

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Who gets to own a colour

UPS has its brown, Tiffany its blue and T-Mobile its magenta, while Cadbury spent years fighting over purple and Yves Klein never owned his blue at...

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How the eye and brain make colour

Colour isn't in the paint. It's in your head. A guide to rods, cones, colour constancy, Josef Albers, magenta, and why my gran has been watching...

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How ultramarine went from luxury to everyday blue

For centuries the finest blue in European painting came from a single region of Afghanistan and cost more than gold. Then, in the 1820s, French chemists...

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Who was allowed to wear which colours

For centuries, laws and price lists decided who could wear purple, crimson or bright blue and who was left with russet and brown. A short history...

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How painters have used black, from Hals to Matisse

The idea that the Impressionists banned black is only partly true. A look at how Hals, Goya, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Whistler and Matisse actually handled the...

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What the colours on food packaging are really doing

Supermarket shelves run on colour folklore. Some of it holds up in the lab, some of it does not, and one shade of purple ended up...

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When Pantone colours went black in Adobe, and Stuart Semple's FREETONE

In 2022 most Pantone colour books were pulled from Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign unless designers paid for a Pantone subscription, and old files opened with the...

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Teal and orange: how digital grading changed the colour of films

Around 2000, Hollywood started scanning whole films into computers so their colour could be adjusted shot by shot. Within ten years critics were complaining that the...

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How four directors use colour on screen

Wes Anderson grades his decades, Kubrick lit a party with Christmas lights, Lynch hung red curtains and Cuarón chose green because it makes you uneasy. A...

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Elephant's Breath, Dead Salmon and the business of naming paint

Farrow & Ball sells greys and pinks under names that tell you almost nothing about the colour. The history of colour naming, and some research on...

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How screens handle colour, from sRGB to Display P3

Why a painting, a paint swatch or a photograph of your work looks different from one screen to the next, and what colour spaces, gamuts and...

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Tyrian purple, the snail dye of emperors

For centuries the most prestigious colour in the Mediterranean came from the glands of sea snails, took thousands of them per gram and stank. This is...

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Lead white, the poisonous white of the old masters

For more than two thousand years painters made their whites from lead corroded in vinegar and dung. It handled beautifully, it was toxic, and centuries later...

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Cennino Cennini's recipe for the perfect blue

Around 1400 a Florentine painter wrote down how to pull ultramarine out of lapis lazuli. His recipe, with its wax, lye and three days of kneading,...

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What light does to paint

Why colours fade, which historic pigments suffered most, and how the ASTM and Blue Wool scales measure a paint's resistance to light.

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Afterimages and the colours that come from nowhere

Stare at a colour long enough and the visual system starts producing its opposite. A look at afterimages, from Goethe at an inn to Chevreul at...

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Tetrachromats and the colours most people cannot see

A small number of women carry genes for a fourth kind of colour receptor, and at least one has been shown to use it. What the...

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Kerry James Marshall and the black of his figures

Since 1980 Kerry James Marshall has painted Black people in black, mixed from several pigments and handled like any other colour. This is how he does...

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What the colour wheel leaves out

The colour wheel taught in schools grew out of Isaac Newton's 1704 circle and an 18th century painters' tradition of red, yellow and blue. This is...

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Yves Klein and the leap into the void

How Yves Klein staged a flight, registered a blue, emptied a gallery and sold empty space for gold, and how those works stretched the idea of...

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Magenta and the missing wavelength

There is no single wavelength of light that looks magenta. This is how the eye and brain make the colour anyway, and why it got its...

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Why red was sacred

From ochre ground in a South African cave 100,000 years ago to Rothko's dark red murals, a short history of how red came to carry life,...

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Why the sky is blue and sunsets are red

A sunset is daylight with most of the blue taken out. The physics behind it runs from Tyndall's smoke-filled tube to the volcanic skies painted by...

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Pantone and the business of owning a colour language

How an ink chemist at a New Jersey printing firm turned colour matching into a world standard, and how Pantone's Colour of the Year turned that...

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Why fluorescent colours look brighter than white

Fluorescent paint takes in light you cannot see, or can barely see, and gives it back as light you can. How that trick was discovered in...

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Egyptian blue, the oldest synthetic pigment

Thousands of years before modern chemistry, Egyptian workshops were firing sand, lime and copper into a blue that does not exist in nature in any useful...

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YInMn Blue and the furnace that made a new blue

In 2009 a chemistry lab at Oregon State University went looking for an electronic material and found a blue pigment instead. This is how YInMn Blue...

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Why primates see in colour

Most mammals see the world with two kinds of cone. Humans and their closest relatives have three, thanks to a gene that copied itself tens of...

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Dazzle: the war artists who painted ships to fool U-boats

In 1917 a marine painter persuaded the Admiralty to cover merchant ships in clashing stripes so that submarine officers would misread their course. Artists carried it...

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Why a print never quite matches the screen

Screens make colour by adding light and printers make it by taking light away, so the two can never show exactly the same set of colours....

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How to see more colour

Your eyes send the brain far less colour information than it feels like they do. Here is what the science says about how colour vision works,...

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Cochineal, the red that came from a bug

For centuries Europe's best crimson came from a small insect farmed on cactus pads in Mexico. How cochineal was grown, traded, misunderstood and finally put under...

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Scheele's green and the arsenic in the Victorian home

In 1775 a Swedish chemist made a brilliant green out of copper and arsenic, and for nearly a century it went onto walls, dresses, books and...

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