Blue color

 

Blue:

The semi-precious stone lapis lazuli was used in ancient Egypt for jeweler and ornament and later, in the Renaissance, to make the pigment ultramarine, the most expensive of all pigments. Distant objects appear bluer because of another optical effect called aerial perspective.

Blue has been an important color in art and decoration since ancient times. In the 19th century, synthetic blue dyes and pigments gradually replaced organic dyes and mineral pigments. In US and European public opinion polls it is the most popular color, chosen by almost half of both men and women as their favorite color. Blue is one of the three primary colors in the RYB color model (traditional color theory), as well as in the RGB (additive) colors model. An optical effect called Tyndall effect explains blue eyes. It lies between violet and cyan on the spectrum of visible light. Europeans wore clothing colored with the vegetable dye woad until it was replaced by the finer indigo from America. In the Middle Ages, European artists used it in the windows of cathedrals. The eye perceives blue when observing light with a dominant wavelength between approximately 450 and 495 nanometers. Dark blue became a common color for military uniforms and later, in the late 20th century, for business suits. The clear daytime sky and the deep sea appear blue because of an optical effect known as Rayleigh scattering. The same surveys also showed that blue was the color most associated with the masculine, just ahead of black, and was also the color most associated with intelligence, knowledge, calm, and concentration. Because blue has commonly been associated with harmony, it was chosen as the color of the flags of the United Nations and the European Union.

Surveys in the US and Europe show that blue is the color most commonly associated with harmony, faithfulness, confidence, distance, infinity, the imagination, cold, and occasionally with sadness. Most blues contain a slight mixture of other colors; azure contains some green, while ultramarine contains some violet. In the eighth century Chinese artists used cobalt blue to color fine blue and white porcelain. Color names often developed individually in natural languages, typically beginning with black and white (or dark and light), and then adding red, and only much later – usually as the last main category of color accepted in a language – adding the color blue, probably when blue pigments could be manufactured reliably in the culture using that language. (For more on this subject, see Distinguishing blue from green in language.

Linguistic research indicates that languages do not begin by having a word for the color blue. The modern English word blue comes from Middle English bleu or blew, from the Old French bleu, a word of Germanic origin, related to the Old High German word bloat (meaning 'shimmering, lustrous').[6] In heraldry, the word azure is used for blue.

In Russian, Spanish and some other languages, there is no single word for blue, but rather different words for light blue and dark blue. For example, in Vietnamese, the color of both tree leaves and the sky is Xinh. In Lakota, the word the is used for both blue and green, the two colors not being distinguished in older Lakota. In Japanese, the word for blue is often used for colors that English speakers would refer to as green, such as the color of a traffic signal meaning "go". See Color term.

Several languages, including Japanese and Lakota Sioux, use the same word to describe blue and green. Later, printers discovered that more accurate colors could be created by using combinations of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink, put onto separate inked plates and then overlaid one at a time onto paper. Mixing all three primary colors together produces a dark brown. Pure blue, in the middle, has a wavelength of 470 nanometers.

Isaac Newton included blue as one of the seven colors in his first description the visible spectrum. Blues with a higher frequency and thus a shorter wavelength gradually look more violet, while those with a lower frequency and a longer wavelength gradually appear greener. From the Renaissance onward, painters used this system to create their colors. (See RYB color model.)

The RYB model was used for color printing by Jacob Christoph Le Blon as early as 1725. He included indigo, the hue between blue and violet, as one of the separate colors, though today it is usually considered a hue of blue.

In painting and traditional color theory, blue is one of the three primary colors of pigments (red, yellow, blue), which can be mixed to form a wide gamut of colors. Red and blue mixed together form violet, blue and yellow together form green. He chose seven colors because that was the number of notes in the musical scale, which he believed was related to the optical spectrum. This method could produce almost all the colors in the spectrum with reasonable accuracy. Human eyes perceive blue when observing light which has a dominant wavelength of roughly 450–495 nanometers Later, printers discovered that more accurate colors could be created by using combinations of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink, put onto separate inked plates and then overlaid one at a time onto paper. Mixing all three primary colors together produces a dark brown. Pure blue, in the middle, has a wavelength of 470 nanometers.

Isaac Newton included blue as one of the seven colors in his first description the visible spectrum. Blues with a higher frequency and thus a shorter wavelength gradually look more violet, while those with a lower frequency and a longer wavelength gradually appear greener. From the Renaissance onward, painters used this system to create their colors. (See RYB color model.)

The RYB model was used for color printing by Jacob Christoph Le Blon as early as 1725. He included indigo, the hue between blue and violet, as one of the separate colors, though today it is usually considered a hue of blue.

In painting and traditional color theory, blue is one of the three primary colors of pigments (red, yellow, blue), which can be mixed to form a wide gamut of colors. Red and blue mixed together form violet, blue and yellow together form green. He chose seven colors because that was the number of notes in the musical scale, which he believed was related to the optical spectrum. This method could produce almost all the colors in the spectrum with reasonable accuracy. Human eyes perceive blue when observing light which has a dominant wavelength of roughly 450–495 nanometers.