As artists, we usually look for the right shade of color to really make our painting pop . If you don’t happen to have the exact shade of blue you need, here’s how you can modify your blue acrylic paint to achieve your desired shade.
Understanding the Color Blue and Its Shades (Guide 2022)
Blue is the color between violet and cyan on the visible color spectrum. It’s a primary color in both RYB and RGB color models. Blue is the color of a clear daytime sky, the deep sea, and the fifth band on a rainbow.
This color’s name means “shimmering” or “lustrous” and has been in artistic use since ancient times. In today’s modern times, this color symbolizes harmony, faithfulness, confidence, distance, infinity, imagination, coldness, and occasionally sadness.
As an artist, it’s important to understand this refreshing color, how it’s used in the past until today, what it means and the different emotions it evokes, as well as its different shades, and how to produce them.
This article aims to help you do just that.
A Brief History of the Color Blue
Our ancestors started using the color blue relatively later than other colors. Unlike the colors red, black, brown, ochre, pink, and purple that have been used in art, decorations, and dyes since prehistoric times, it took humankind thousands of years before we developed good blue dyes and pigments. These early blue dyes came from woad (Europe) and Indigo (Africa and Asia) while blue pigments came from azurite or lapis lazuli.
The ancient Egyptians used lapis lazuli for the eyebrows of King Tutankhamun’s death mask. The precious stone was an expensive import so the ancient Egyptians started grinding silica, lime, copper, and alkalai together and then heating it to 800 or 900 °C to produce their own blue pigment – Egyptian blue.
The ancient Greeks imported indigo dye from India, calling it indikon . They also used Egyptian blue in the wall paintings of Knossos in Crete and to paint the beards on statues.
The ancient Romans also imported indigo dye from India and used it on the clothes of their working class.
During the time of the Byzantine empire, dark blue was most commonly used to decorate churches. In Byzantine art, Jesus and the Virgin Mary were usually depicted wearing dark blue or purple.
In the early Middle Ages, blue became the color of the poor (who dyed their clothes with woad) until the Abbe Suger rebuilt the Saint-Denis Basilica with cobalt-colored windows. It was also around this time when the Virgin Mary’s clothes were depicted with ultramarine – the most expensive dye from Asia at the time.
During the Renaissance, artists started harmonizing blue with red and white to better depict the world as they saw it. The master painter Raphael was particularly renowned for this technique.
Blue became the color of choice for the uniform of the German and Prussian armies in the 17th century.
In the 18th century, the British also adopted the color blue (navy blue) for their naval officer uniforms. Blue would later become the color of liberty and revolution. In America, George Washington declared the official color for all uniforms to be blue and buff.
It was around the 18th and 19th centuries that synthetic pigments became more readily available. This was also the time when complementary colors were established in color theory and saw blue complemented by orange and yellow . The synthetic pigment cobalt blue became the favorite color of some impressionists, including Auguste Renoir and Vincent van Gogh.
While blue represented liberty and revolution in the 18th century, the 19th century saw it become more of a governmental and authoritative color. This was when it became the color for policemen and other public servants.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, renowned painters like Pablo Picasso used blue and green to create a melancholy mood in paintings.
In today’s age of the Internet, blue has become the standard color of hyperlinks in graphic browsers.
Blue Colors: Psychology and Meaning
The color blue has been around since ancient times and has picked up several meanings along the way.
Ancient humans used the color to depict the sky and the sea which has led to the color being associated with the freedom of open spaces, imagination, intuition, sensitivity, and inspiration.
Because of its connection to both the sea and sky, the color blue also came to represent spirituality, calmness, peace, and hope.
The color has also become symbolic of deep loyalty, trust, wisdom, sincerity, faith, confidence, stability, and intelligence.
When used in excess, blue can also represent impersonality, unfriendliness, and coldness as well as depression and sadness.
Why is the color blue so rare in nature?
Feeling blue? That color isn’t as common as you may think.
In poison dart frogs, bright blue colors broadcast a warning to predators that the animal is toxic. (Image credit: Lillian King/Getty Images)
When you look up at the blue sky overhead or gaze across the seemingly endless expanse of a blue ocean, you might think that the color blue is common in nature.
But among all the hues found in rocks, plants and flowers, or in the fur, feathers, scales and skin of animals, blue is surprisingly scarce.
But why is the color blue so rare? The answer stems from the chemistry and physics of how colors are produced — and how we see them.
We’re able to see color because each of our eyes contains between 6 million and 7 million light-sensitive cells called cones. There are three different types of cones in the eye of a person with normal color vision, and each cone type is most sensitive to a particular wavelength of light: red, green or blue. Information from millions of cones reaches our brains as electrical signals that communicate all the types of light reflected by what we see, which is then interpreted as different shades of color.
When we look at a colorful object, such as a sparkling sapphire or a vibrant hydrangea bloom, “the object is absorbing some of the white light that falls onto it; because it’s absorbing some of the light, the rest of the light that’s reflected has a color,” science writer Kai Kupferschmidt, author of “Blue: In Search of Nature’s Rarest Color” (The Experiment, 2021), told Live Science.
“When you see a blue flower — for instance, a cornflower — you see the cornflower as blue because it absorbs the red part of the spectrum,” Kupferschmidt said. Or to put it another way, the flower appears blue because that color is the part of the spectrum that the blossom rejected, Kupferschmidt wrote in his book, which explores the science and nature of this popular hue.
In the visible spectrum, red has long wavelengths, meaning it is very low-energy compared with other colors. For a flower to appear blue, “it needs to be able to produce a molecule that can absorb very small amounts of energy,” in order to absorb the red part of the spectrum, Kupferschmidt said.
Generating such molecules — which are large and complex — is difficult for plants to do, which is why blue flowers are produced by fewer than 10% of the world’s nearly 300,000 flowering plant species. One possible driver for the evolution of blue flowers is that blue is highly visible to pollinators such as bees, and producing blue blossoms may benefit plants in ecosystems where competition for pollinators is high, Adrian Dyer, an associate professor and vision scientist at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, told the Australian Broadcasting Company in 2016.
As for minerals, their crystal structures interact with ions (charged atoms or molecules) to determine which parts of the spectrum are absorbed and which are reflected. The mineral lapis lazuli, which is mined primarily in Afghanistan and produces the rare blue pigment ultramarine, contains trisulfide ions — three sulfur atoms bound together inside a crystal lattice — that can release or bind a single electron.
“That energy difference is what makes the blue,” Kupferschmidt said.
Blue animals’ colors don’t come from chemical pigments. Rather, they rely on physics to create a blue appearance. Blue-winged butterflies in the Morpho genus have intricate, layered nanostructures on their wing scales that manipulate layers of light so that some colors cancel each other out and only blue is reflected; a similar effect happens in structures found in the feathers of blue jays (Cyanocitta cristata), the scales of blue tangs (Paracanthurus hepatus) and the flashing rings of venomous blue-ringed octopuses (Hapalochlaena maculosa).
Blue shades in mammals are even rarer than in birds, fish, reptiles and insects. Some whales and dolphins have bluish skin; primates such as golden snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus roxellana) have blue-skinned faces; and mandrills (Mandrillus sphinx) have blue faces and blue rear ends. But fur — a trait shared by most terrestrial mammals — is never naturally bright blue (at least, not in visible light. Researchers recently found that platypus fur glows in vivid shades of blue and green when exposed to ultraviolet (UV) rays, Live Science previously reported).
“But it takes a lot of work to make this blue, and so the other question becomes: What are the evolutionary reasons to make blue? What’s the incentive?” Kupferschmidt said. “The fascinating thing when you dive into these animal worlds is always, who’s the recipient of this message and can they see the blue?”
For example, while humans have three light-sensing receptor types in our eyes, birds have a fourth receptor type for sensing UV light. Feathers that appear blue to human eyes “actually reflect even more UV light than blue light,” Kupferschmidt explained. By that reasoning, the birds that we call blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) “would probably call themselves ‘UV tits,’ because that’s what they would mostly see,” he said.
Because of blue’s scarcity in nature, the word for blue was a relative latecomer to languages around the world, appearing after the words for black, white, red and yellow, according to Kupferschmidt.
“One theory for this is that you really only need to name a color once you can dye things — once you can divorce the color from its object. Otherwise, you don’t really need the name for the color,” he explained. “Dyeing things blue or finding a blue pigment happened really late in most cultures, and you can see that in the linguistics.”
The earliest use of blue dye dates to about 6,000 years ago in Peru, and the ancient Egyptians combined silica, calcium oxide and copper oxide to create a long-lasting blue pigment known as irtyu for decorating statues, researchers reported Jan. 15 in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science. Ultramarine, a vivid blue pigment ground from lapis lazuli, was as precious as gold in medieval Europe, and was reserved primarily for illustrating illuminated manuscripts.
RELATED MYSTERIES
Blue’s rarity meant that people viewed it as a high-status color for thousands of years. Blue has long been associated with the Hindu deity Krishna and with the Christian Virgin Mary, and artists who were famously inspired by blue in nature include Michelangelo, Gauguin, Picasso and Van Gogh, according to the Frontiers in Plant Science study.
“The relative scarcity of blue available in natural pigments likely fueled our fascination,” the scientists wrote.
Blue also colors our expressions, appearing in dozens of English idioms: You can work a blue-collar job, swear a blue streak, sink into a blue funk or talk until you’re blue in the face, to name just a few. And blue can sometimes mean contradictory things depending on the idiom: “‘Blue sky ahead’ means a bright future, but ‘feeling blue’ is being sad,” Kupferschmidt said.
Blue’s scarcity in nature may have helped shape our perception of the color and things that appear blue. “With blue, it’s like a whole canvas that you can still paint on,” Kupferschmidt said. “Maybe because it is rare in nature and maybe because we associate it with things that we can’t really touch, like the sky and the sea, it’s something that is very open to different associations.”
Editor’s note: The article was updated Sept. 7 to reflect that lapis lazuli is mined in locations other than Afghanistan, though Afghanistan is the main source of the mineral.
Originally published on Live Science.
