Ultramarine (PB29)
The original ultramarine pigment was made from the blue mineral lazurite, found in lapis lazuli, a semi-precious rock that has been mined in the mountains of northern Afghanistan for more than 6,000 years. The…
Category: Blue colors
Phthalo blue (red shade)
This is an updated version of the text and images first written on August 5, 2020. It was discovered by accident in the 1920s and produced as a pigment in 1935, under the name…
Phthalo Turquois (PB16)
The color most commonly referred to as Phthalo Turquoise (PB16) is not as widely used as other phthalo blue colors. A handful of major manufacturers offer it, sometimes under imaginative names: Although the pigment…
Manganese Blue PB33 vs imitations
Manganese Blue (PB33) is a pigment that hasn’t been manufactured since the late 1980s. It can still be found through small producers of handmade paints, but if you come across the paint, it will…
Blue favorites
There are many nice blue watercolors, and I like most of them. I use blue color for a lot, and blue is an essential component in most of the color mixes I create. Additionally,…
Indigo – NB1
Indigo is a dye that is extracted from more than 30 different species of the plant Indigofera, which is widely present in large parts of the world. It is from the green leaves that…
Mayan blue
People have long wondered how the Mayan people, thousands of years ago, could produce a blue color so resistant to light, moisture and other degrading factors that after a thousand years, or more, the…
Is blue the most important color?
When I teach about colors for the first time with my students, I usually say that the color blue is important, perhaps the most important of all. On the other hand, I have met…
Cobalt Blue Deep (PB72 PB73 PB74)
In 1802, the French chemist Louis Jacques Thénard discovered the pigment we today call cobalt blue deep in an attempt to find a blue color that could replace the very expensive lapis lazuli. There…
Cerulean Blue (PB35, PB36)
If you search for “Cölinblå” on Google, which is the traditional Swedish name for the color, you only get a few results, most from Riksantikvarieämbetet (The Swedish National Heritage Board), but if you change…
