Hello fellow artists. There are many art things of the past and present that you might not know, so here’s some facts!
An Accidental New Blue
YinMn Blue was a hue that was accidentally created in a lab. It has other names, mainly Oregon Blue and Mas Blue. YinMn blue is said to never fade, and is non-toxic. The pigment was accidentally discovered in 2009 at the Oregon State University. I was a little kid when this blue was discovered. Since YinMn blue was discovered, the university continued to research pigments, and more pigments have been created. YinMn blue is a nice-looking color. More recently this color has been made available to purchase in the form of crayons and artist paints. There is a Crayola crayon called Bluetiful that first became available in 2017, that is inspired by YinMn blue. Bluetiful replaced their retired Dandelion Yellow. I remember having Dandelion Yellow in crayon boxes as a kid. It was my favorite back then. As of a few years ago, some paint companies sell YinMn blue, and there are also individual people who sell their own recreations of the hue.
A Pretty Shade of Pink was Used for an Experiment
Baker-Miller Pink, otherwise known as Drunk Tank Pink is a color that has been observed to reduce aggression. It’s a calming color, and a pleasant-looking hue as well. The pink was created in 1979, and it was used in prisons for an experiment during the 80s to see if it helped reduce aggression and violence in prison inmates. The results were unclear. Regardless of its use, this shade of pink is a very pleasant-looking color.
Photoshop Long Before Photoshop/Painted Photos?
Ever wondered why colored photography existed, before color cameras became more mainstream? Well, that is because many photos were painted on! There was a type of paint that was marketed to be for that purpose. They were often in the form of kits that had multiple colors. Other than oil paint kits, there were other means that were used such as watercolors, crayons, pastels, dyes and other paints. Typically the color was added with either a paintbrush, one’s finger, a Q-tip/cotton swab, or an airbrush.
Color Theory Discrepancy
The typical Color theory is mostly based upon the system of red, yellow and blue being the primary colors, which is why the primary colors being red yellow and blue is often taught in schools. It’s just the norm at this point, and traditional color theory was built upon the norm.
Red, yellow and blue are widely considered primary colors. However, in reality that is not the case. There are two color models, with different colors associated with them. The additive color model, and the subtractive color model. The Additive color model is used when light is involved, such as with monitor displays, or cameras. The subtractive model is used for color mixing in everything else, whether mixing paint, mixing colors for a character design, printing, or anything else.
There is the RGB color model which is Red Green Blue. RGB is used digitally, in things such as displays, as well as camera color models. I suppose in those usages, those colors are technically primary colors, for light at least. Another color model, typically used for printers is CMYK, which is Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black. RGB is considered an additive color model, and CMYK and RYB (Red, Yellow and Blue) are considered subtractive models. This is really based upon how these color models work.
With subtractive color models, CMYK is actually better than RYB as CMYK has much better color mixing than RYB. For example, with the RYB color model, you can’t make cyan or magenta with red, yellow and blue, but with cyan, yellow and magenta you can make red, yellow and blue. You can make RYB with CMYK but not vice-versa, essentially.
RYB is the color model taught in early grade classes because at this point its just the norm. It would likely take time to switch over, if anyone ever decided to fix things and have CMYK be taught as the primaries instead of RYB.
Magenta is a True Primary…in Paint at Least
There is a specific type of cool-toned magenta, that is practically impossible to mix from other colors, within paint. It is called either Pure Quinacridone or Permanent Rose. Shades of red can be mixed from this nice hue of magenta.
Pure Quinacridone/Permanent Rose may be a true primary color, in regards to color mixing. This is because it is impossible to mix from other colors. It’s a very pretty color! I only paint once in a while, but if I ever start to paint more often, I’ll try to get my hands on some of that beautiful hue.
Mother Colors
A Mother Color is where you take a specific color (it can be anything) and mix a small amount of it into all the other colors you are using. This will actually help unify all the colors you are using. This can work for traditional art like paint, but it can even work for digital art too! A Mother Color can be anything, there is no specific color the Mother Color has to be. In digital art, how exactly you mix the colors will depend on the program, but if all else fails, taking a color in one layer, and having your mother color in another layer, making sure the colors overlap, and setting the mother color layer low (around roughly 15 to 30 percent opacity, more or less) can always work.
Zorn’s Palette
Anders Zorn was a Swedish painter, and he was known to have a limited palette in his art. The main paint colors he used were of Lead White, Yellow Ochre, Vermilion, and Ivory Black. Nowadays for those that use this combo, it is recommended to use safer, modern equivalents of those colors, as some of those paints contained dangerous ingredients. The modern equivalent of his palette is usually considered Titanium White, Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Red, and Ivory Black.
He mixed those colors together in various ways to get other colors he used such as oranges, browns, shades of grey, and even a few greens! It allows you to have many colors, while still having a limited color palette in regard to initial colors. This leads to a more visually unified palette. This technique is not limited to physical painting, it can be done in digital art too.
Deadly and Strange Paints of the Past
Lead, arsenic, radium, oh my!
Many substances that are now known to be horribly dangerous were once used in pigments and paints of the past. These paints would now be antique, regardless of that, they are still dangerous. If you ever buy a set of antique paints, be careful. There might be dangerous paints in that old paint set!
Lead, arsenic, cinnabar, chromium, manganese, and even radium and uranium were used in paints.
A few of these deadly paints are Lead White, Naples Yellow, Vermilion, Chrome Green, Scheele’s Green, Paris Green, Manganese Blue, London Purple, and Uranium Orange (a color that was used for a specific red/orange color of Fiesta/Fiestaware dinnerware).
Manganese Blue was actually the closest oil paint ever to get to a true cyan.
There are also paints and dyes that have unusual origins, such as Mummy Brown, a paint that was for the most part made from literal ground up mummies, and Indian Yellow, a paint that was said to be created from a process involving cow pee. I can see why these paints aren’t made nowadays.
Even glow in the dark paint was once made with radium!
In the modern day, there are artificial recreations and substitutions that exist for some of these dangerous or unusual paints. They look similar in hue, but don’t have the danger or strange ingredients that the true paints have.
In the featured image of this article, I incorporated a few of the colors mentioned in this article, onto the “paper” in the drawing. The lighter green is Paris Green and the darker green is Scheele’s Green, the yellow is Naples Yellow, the pink is Baker-Miller Pink, and the blue is YinMn Blue. There are known hex codes for those colors, which is how I was able to incorporate them into the drawing. I added a cartoon animal skull, I added to represent the fact that many old paints were made with deadly ingredients, and the question mark to represent the fact that at one point, not much was known about those pigments that are now known to be composed of dangerous substances. I had considered adding shading to the skull, as if it had been drawn with a pencil, but I ended up not liking how it looked in the end. At least in a digital drawing, you can have an idea as to what the pigments looked like, without the danger or cost of buying the actual pigments, depending on what it is in question.
A Painting Has a Mailbox?
Apparently the Louvre Museum has a mailbox for the Mona Lisa, because of how much mail is addressed to the painting. It’s clear that many love the Mona Lisa, from the fact the painting has its own mailbox. Sending mail to a painting is a bit unusual, but I suppose someone in the museum thought it was a good call.
A Glowing Rabbit was an Art Piece?
There was once an albino rabbit that was genetically modified to glow green when exposed to blue light. This rabbit was named Alba. Alba was able to glow because of the GFP gene that was found in the jellyfish Aequorea victoria. Alba was the result of a collaboration between a contemporary artist named Eduardo Kac, and a geneticist named Louis-Marie Houdebine. Alba was reported to have passed in 2002 roughly at either the age of four, or two and a half. It’s unclear how old exactly the rabbit was. Either way, this is a normal age for a rabbit. Considering there is discrepancy on how old exactly Alba was, it’s unclear when exactly she was born.
I hope you learned something new!