Abecedarian's own Carte Blanche Atlas of Uncharted Territories ranked #1 in Stephen Saperstein Frug's top ten "still-fresh" resources on the Web.  Frug explains that "lots of things on the web are evergreens: just as good a year from now as a year ago."  He has collected "pieces whose virtue are not bound by historical moment" and that are "worth your attention."  Thanks, Stephen!  We're honored!

Meanwhile, our own One-Letter Words: A Dictionary was recommended in the Harvard Independent's holiday gift guide.  They call it "a lot more fun than a regular dictionary."  Let's hear the Harvard cheer: "Rah, rah, rah!"

A picture's worth a hundred pennies. 

Multicolored, Multilingual

When we talk of colors, we can't help but be multilingual. Our world tour of exotic color names continues on through Italy, England, Greece, and Iran. Let's take a pictorial tour of these colorful cultures, in search of an exotic blue metamorphic rock that yields a bright pigment when crushed.

by Brian J. Geiger.

Magenta is named in honor of the town in northern Italy where the bloodlike purplish red dye was discovered.

 

by ho visto nina volare.

Siena is named in honor of the city in Tuscany where a school of art flourished in the 13th and 14th centuries. Burnt siena is a deep reddish-brown pigment.

 

by cbmd.

Scarlet is a Middle English word originally meaning any brightly colored fabric. Today it exclusively refers to brilliant red.

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

A door of an Omani fort, or a make-your-own-lemonade stand?

Mineral Colors from the Near Side of the Moon

Eons of meteorite impacts on the lunar surface have left an amazing array of mineral deposits. Back in 1971, cartographers Don E. Wilhelms and John F. McCauley of the U.S. Geological Survey created a series of startlingly colorful lunar maps for NASA. The details below are from the Moon's near side. To see large and complete maps of the moon, see the U.S. Geological Survey Website.

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

I finally understand how three-layer cake can be part of a balanced diet.

A baby's murmurs: poetic echoes of a universal language, or merely "high coos"?

Microscopic Colors

The Micropolitan Museum exhibits an unworldly spectrum visible only through the lens of a microscope. Painter Wim van Egmond photographs spectacular microscopic masterpieces with ethereal color palettes. To capture these hidden treasures, he uses a Zeiss Standard light microscope and an old Zeiss Photo-microscope. Several methods of illumination are employed: bright-field, dark-field, phase contrast, differential interference contrast, and Rheinberg illumination.

Van Egmond's Insectarium offers such specimens as the iridescent butterfly wing, whose tiny scales possess a microscopic texture that refracts light. Here we find lavender blue and green.

The delicate wing of the mosquito, on the other hand, is covered with ting feather-like structures. Deep greens, golds, and aquas are apparent.

---

The Botanic Garden presents the vibrant red of grains of Lily pollen.

The stem of the Mare's Tail, an aquatic flowering plant, offers dazzling purples and violets.

The pine needle is ablaze with dark blue, light blue, bright red, and orange.

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

by mitzelman_99.

Moonbows: Colors of the Night

by Christian Fenn.

Just as the sun illuminates rainbows during the day, reflected sunlight from the moon can reveal moonbows and moon halos at night. The most favorable time for a moonbow to appear is during a rain shower opposite a full or very bright moon. The night sky needs to be very dark, and moonbow watchers should stand with their backs to the moon. The colors of the moonbow will be dim pastels, in contrast to the vibrant hues of a daytime rainbow.

A moon halo, on the other hand, is visible near the moon itself as a result of moonlight scattered through ice crystals in very high clouds. The colors of a moon halo tend to be brigher than a moonbow.

The headlights of a car can create a phenomenon called a fog bow as they illuminate water vapor during misty conditions. Christian Fenn reported "Fogbows are more feebly colored than their Sun illuminated counterparts (rainbows) and usually appear whitish to the unaided eye."

The rainbow appears throughout world mythology as a symbolic bridge between the divine and the mundane. Moonbows remind us that even on the darkest night of the soul, there is a glimmer of promise, however faint.

Moonbow over the Pacific Ocean in Tahiti. by Pierre Lesage.

 

After the war was over
I was coming home to you
I saw a rainbow at midnight
out on the ocean blue
—Ernest Tubb, "Rainbow at Midnight," 1946.

by Thoth, God of Knowledge.

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

Colours of French Extraction

When we talk of colors, we're often speaking French. Many of our most exotic color names are of French origin. Let's take a pictorial tour of the colorful French countryside, where we'll encounter drunken monasteries, burrowing insectivorous mammals, jumping blood-sucking insects, earthy shadows, juicy fruits, and edible ornamentals.

 

by Funky Coda.

Umber is derived from the French phrase "terre d'ombre," literally "earth of shadow." Raw umber is a dark yellow brown pigment, while burnt umber is roasted to a dark brown.

 

by Oklahoma State University.

Puce is of French origin and literally means "flea" color. Puce is purplish-brown or dark red.

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

by nalilo.

No Name Colors

We are the nameless colors. No mere words can encapsulate our radiance. We are questions without easy answers. We are puzzles for the sake of enigma. We are the cats that get your tongue, leaving you speechless in our wake. We are anonymous yet individual, handleless yet graspable, inscrutable yet deep. Would a color by any other name look as sweet? We are the nameless colors--the only colors truly beyond description.

Art expert Joseph H. Krause notes that "In the English language, there are fewer than thirty words whose major function is to designate a specific color. These include auburn, azure, brown, black, blue, cerise, crimson, cyan, dun, ecru, gray, green, indigo, khaki, maroon, mauve, puce, purple, red, russet, scarlet, sepia, taupe, ultramarine, white, and yellow—they are all defined in the dictionary as either a specific location on the spectrum or with the phrase 'as having the color of' or 'being the color' followed by the names of objects bearing the color. . . .

"There are also colors that are named after specific objects—animals, vegetables, or minerals; their names, having been in use for a long time, have come to be regarded, when used in the proper context, primarily as colors. Within this group are such names as beige, buff, lavender, lilac, orange, pink, sienna, umber, rust, turquoise, silver, gold, emerald, sapphire, and fawn. And some of these names have lost their original meaning and now stand for the color alone. However, even with this list, the number of color names remains fairly small. Therefore we use a variety of linguistic devices to extend it.

1. Combining names for a single color that has two hue qualities, e.g., yellow-green, blue-violet, yellow-orange
2. Limiting names by the use of a modifier denoting lightness, e.g., dark blue, dark red, light red, light blue, light green
3. Limiting names by the use of a modifier referring to the degree of color saturation, e.g., dull red, bright red, dull green, bright green
4. Adding the suffix ish, e.g., yellowish, greenish, reddish
5. Using such descriptive adjectives as mellow, harsh, garish, or subtle

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

by Jonathan Assink

The Electrifying Colors of Candlelight

by photo-artiste.

Warm, romantic, rich, enlivening, homey, flattering to the complexion, prayerful, even mysterious and mystical—there's nothing quite like the atmospheric glow of candlelight. Though typically classified as yellow or golden, a flickering candle flame actually exhibits all the colors of the rainbow. A touch of candlelight can offer emotional appeal, a festive air, or a seductive sparkle to virtually any color palette.

According to Celtic lore, candlelight is the only illumination hospitable to shadow. "The ideal light to befriend the darkness, it gently opens up caverns in the darkness and prompts the imagination into activity. The candle allows the darkness to keep its secrets. There is shadow and color within every candle flame" (Anam Cara, A Book of Celtic Wisdom, 1997).

A candle flame is composed of four distinct layers, visible to the naked eye. Each layer is a distinct color: white, light yellow, dark red (or brown or orange), and blue. At the base is a relatively cool blue layer (800° C), where the material of the burning candle is in contact with oxygen. A dark red cone surrounds the wick. Of low temperature (1000° C), this cone is formed of vaporized carbon molecules. Around the dark cone is a brighter layer of incandescent carbon (1200° C), light yellow in color. A thin outer envelope of hot white light (1400° C) is faintly luminous and tends toward yellow at the tip (where the carbon is completely combusted). A spectroscope reveals bright gaseous bands surrounding the outer envelope, colored yellow, green, blue, red, and violet.

The magic of candlelight offers a gold leaf finish to even the most squalid surroundings. "Candlelight takes the edge off clutter, mutes the blemish of poverty—the unupholstered, the unplastered, the peeling the tarnished, the unfinished. Candlelight relegates dust and dinge to the shadows, antiques all objects in a golden sepia tone and casts an oscillating incandescence that romanticizes even the sparest of dwellings. Candlelight elevates the street-picked, the shabby, the scavenged to haunting grandeur" (Laren Stover, Bohemian Manifesto, 2004).

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

by MrUllmi.

Lens Flares: Sunbeams at Play

Stray rays of sunlight bouncing inside the lens barrel of a camera leave ghostly trails of stars, glowing halos, subtle rainbows, and specular orbs. Photographers may abhor these secondary traces of light, but lens flares serve a purpose: they create a sense of depth, focus intensity, provide an accent, and lend a dreamy glow to the scenario. The colors of lens flares are typically bright, desaturated, somewhat foggy, and somehow ethereal. Their charm lies in their uncontrolled, unpremeditated, and exuberant nature. Lens flares represent light at play within the tools we use to capture it. They offer brilliant highlights beyond our normal reach.

 

A ghostly green spectral crescent and pink aura of the moon inspired this palette. by Chealion.

 

A lens flare bathes a street preacher in a veritable patchwork quilt of colors (left). A sunrise over a church spire creates a lens flare rainbow of bright reds and blues (right). by Ouij and Guerito.

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

My mother baked Halloween cookies, and I couldn't help but notice that something was amiss.  Humorist Jonathan Caws-Elwitt offers his two cents:

by c-eight.

Spectral Spectres

Shrouded in mystery, ghostly apparitions materialize in many subtly haunting colors. Besides deathly white, the specrtral spectrum embraces ethereal violets, cadaverous yellows, twilit blues, midnight blacks, moonlit silvers, and near-transparent yet unmistakable hues spanning the entire night rainbow. The delicate, insubstantial hues of the ghostly realm can add an emotive dimension of wistfulness to any palette, Halloween-themed or otherwise.

Charley: What color? Nancy: Ghost color. Charley: Ghost color? Oh, ghost color! —John Cecil Holm, Gramercy Ghost (1951)

Strange white lustres and shadowy blacks are integral to the philosophy of art teacher John Ruskin. He explains: "When white is well managed, it ought to be strangely delicious,—tender as well as bright,—like inlaid mother of pearl, or white roses washed in milk. The eye ought to seek it for rest, brilliant though it may be; and to feel it as a space of strange, heavely paleness in the midst of the flushing of the colors. This effect you can only reach by general depth of middle tint, by absolutely refusing to allow any white to exist except where you need it, and by keeping the white itself subdued by grey, except at a few points of chief lustre.

"Secondly, you must make the black conspicuous. However small a point of black may be, it ought to catch the eye, otherwise your work is too heavy in the shadow. All the ordinary shadows should be of some colour,—never black, nor approaching black, they should be evidently and always of a luminous nature, and the black should look strange among them; never occuring except in a black object, or in small points indicative of intense shade in the very centre of masses of shadow. Shadows of absolutely negative grey, however, may be beautifully used with white, or with gold; but still through the black thus, in subdued strength, becomes spacious, it should always be conspicuous; the spectator should notice this grey neutrality with some wonder, and enjoy, all the more intensely on account of it, the gold colour and the white which it relieves" (The Elements of Drawing, 1857).

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

I contend that Rene Decartes invented the Lotto in 1633.  This figure, drawn by Decartes, is my proof, from his treatise The World.

There are eight petals on an implied lotus.

Original Colors: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Though it has been depicted countless times on stage and screen, the marvelous land of Oz has an original and quite inventive color palette. The genuine colors of the yellow brick road, the field of poppies, the Cowardly Lion’s mane, the flying monkeys, Toto, and the great Emerald City are preserved in the very first printing of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). That edition of the book is preserved in the Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division, available for on-line viewing with extraordinarily high quality scans.

“The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was an innovative book not least because of the twenty four full color plates and myriad monochromatic illustrations in which the color changed according to the location in the story (Kansas = grey, Emerald City = green and so on). With the illustrative vignettes often encroaching on the text area, the type was cleverly printed over the top of the colored images” (BiblioOdyssey).

Without further ado, here are the official colors of this beloved classic.

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at Colourlovers.com.]

Diamonds in the Rouge

Though widely perceived as colorless, diamonds are infrequently achromatic and can occur in every hue of the rainbow. In fact, color is one of the four standards for judging the beauty and worth of a diamond (the others being carat, cut, and clarity). When it comes to diamond color, there are two seemingly contradictory principles: less is more, and more is more. The fewer impurities and flaws, the more transparent the diamond and the higher the value. Yet rare colors such as blue, green, pink, orange, and black are highly desirable and even museum-worthy. A faint straw yellow will detract from a diamond's value, while a deep yellow is prized.

"White" diamonds are classified according to their degree of transparency. Most white diamonds actually contain yellow or brown tints. The Gemological Institute of America developed a scale of diamond color saturation, ranging from D (colorless) to Z (noticeable light yellow or brown). Diamond color is determined by comparing a gem to a master set. Special folded cards are also used to evaluate color. Dara Horn poetically describes how diamond color is influenced by context. Three diamonds that look identically transparent against deep black velvet reveal their differences when placed in the crease of white paper: "The first sat tarnished on the paper, throbbing a bruised and tawny color; the second glowed a dim yellow like a dying gas lamp in an old painting. The last one, exposed and revealed, blazed burning white."

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at Colourlovers.com.]