WHYEVER?Hues in Tubes… and how they made a name for themselves Pigments are hodophiles, they like to travel! You might dream of art materials made by local hands from locally sourced pigments which were gathered loving and ceremoniously by indigenous people who have been doing so for a million moons on precisely that little bit…
Some paints are named after… d) a vegetable, fruit, berry
WHYEVER?Hues in Tubes… and how they made a name for themselvesSome paints are named after… their content We have covered many of the plants, lichens, flowers, fruit and barks that have been used to (usually) make lake pigments, but not many have ended up with their names on tubes. Save for the two that had…
Some paints are named after… c) insects, animals
WHYEVER?Hues in Tubes… and how they made a name for themselvesSome paints are named after… their content Yes, there’s the already mentioned cuttlefish which, both it and its inky secretion, were called sepia in Latin and gave us that yummy light brown ink, while the octopus gave us black ink and the squid blue. Yes, the murex…
Some paints are named after… b) body parts?
WHYEVER?Hues in Tubes… and how they made a name for themselvesSome paints are named after… their content There is not much chance of finding, nowadays, a tube of Mummy Brown or Caput Mortuum with a warning which would go something like: “This tube contains traces of mummified bodies or parts of chopped-off heads.” Conforms to…
Some paints are named after… a) the mineral, main chemical component or molecule of the pigment
WHYEVER?Hues in Tubes… and how they made a name for themselvesSome paints are named after… their content We seem to have a human need or, at any rate, have developed an urge to organise ‘things’ to understand them better. Clear elemental categories that tried to explain and somehow contain the complex nature of Matter into…
Some paints are named after… g) (last but not least…) a goblin!
WHYEVER?Hues in Tubes… and how they made a name for themselvesSome paints are named after… someone who could be… I am not sure why I felt like closing the door on this character, but our ultimate one is a wicked, cruel goblin who once lived deep in the German mountains, pestering the poor silver miners…
Some paints are named after… f) a philosopher
WHYEVER?Hues in Tubes… and how they made a name for themselvesSome paints are named after… someone who could be… Ardent mineralogist and colour passionate too, he goes by the name of Goethe, and a yellowish-to-reddish-to-dark-brown or even black Earth pigment, Goethite, bears his name. However, one could argue that another pigment would have been much…
Some paints are named after… e) an Emperor, a King, a Queen, even some mythic Royalty
WHYEVER?Hues in Tubes… and how they made a name for themselvesSome paints are named after… someone who could be… One ring down from deities, certainly, but at the time considered their legal representatives, the second-best thing for a pigment was a bit of regal patronage.Emperor Green, another name for the deadly Emerald Green, may have…
Some paints are named after… d) an anonymous potter and an even more random shepard
WHYEVER?Hues in Tubes… and how they made a name for themselvesSome paints are named after… someone who could be… OMG, Potter’s pink! Who you did not read about in the previous section is Mr Potter and his pink—frankly because I had quite forgotten him. A man (again!) I realised I was assuming while putting back…
Some paints are named after… c) a painter
WHYEVER?Hues in Tubes… and how they made a name for themselvesSome paints are named after… someone who could be… Many paint ranges seem to have chosen an artist as their ‘sponsor’. Some quite naturally so, such as Van Gogh and Rembrandt under the umbrella of the Dutch company, Royal Talens, for example. Yet other artists,…
in bed with mona lisa 