Lapis Lazuli: A Blue More Precious Than Gold | Hacker News Reader

Lapis Lazuli: A Blue More Precious Than Gold

hyperallergic.com

100 pointsanacleto42 comments

So now we make PB29 (ultramarine) synthetically, and you can get tubes of ultramarine paint for around $5 for 250 ml of the stuff! This is purer than any artist could have gotten back then!

We also manufacturer other synthetic pigments such as PB15:3 (Phthalo Blue), and PR122 (Quinacridone Magenta) which are far superior than anything historically. Phthalo blue in particular is one of the strongest tinting colors in an artists pallet and is so cheap to manufacture.

Occasionally colors get discontinued, as was the case with Quin Gold (PO49). This is as artists are a secondary market, and when an industry stops needing a pigment, the few artists that use it have no influence. Watercolors for instance come in tiny 5ml tubes!

There is also some confusion about pigments created by the art supply companies. Classical colors such as 'yellow ochre' and 'burnt sienna' get replaced with modern pigments such as PR101.

Golden is very good at labeling paints. Winsor and Newton and Royal Talens... not so much!

https://www.justpaint.org/sorry-wrong-umber-part-i/

I love geeking out over this stuff.

Appendix: You want to start painting acrylics? Get the following:

  Cadmium Yellow Light / Cadmium Lemon (PY35)
  Cadmium Yellow Deep (Make sure single pigment) (PY35)
  Cadmium Red Light (PR108)
  Quin Magenta / Quin Rose (PR122)
  Ultramarine Blue (PB29)
  Phthalo Blue (PB15:3)
  Titanium White (PW6)
  Ivory Black (Pbk9)
  Burnt Sienna (PBr7)

I’m finding this fascinating, any other good links to learn about this kind of thing?

The other fascinating thing is light-fastness. PR83 (Alizarin Crimson) is a cool red (purple facing), and is recommended by many art teachers...

It's also objectively shit as a pigment. It is not light-fast at all, and fades after only a few months.

https://www.justpaint.org/alizarin-crimson-now-you-see-it/

Yet art teachers continue to recommend it. Nowadays most companies sell it as a 'Hue'. That is a mixture of more light-fast paints designed to emulate the original, but some companies sell 'Alizarin Crimson Genuine', which is still recommended by academics to this day.

Other fugitive colors include aureolin and chrome yellow. The later of which was used by Van Gogh and has caused his paintings to fade irreversibly.

https://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i5/Van-Goghs-Fading-Colors-I...

Thanks, I’m going to read myself into a coma tonight.

> ... read myself into a coma

is this a common phrase or regular expression? American or British english?

I do this all the time, and when I start to feel like I'm going to crash, I force myself until I'm close to the next deep insight (like when you see a set of equations slowly taking a certain shape and you think "ok, I think I see where this is going") and stop reading there and then, go to sleep, and the next morning ... the very first thing I think about is finishing that train of thought... It somehow helps me remember the information better, I don't know why but uf I had to take a guess: when we expose ourself to information we aren't wondering about, our brain does not perceive it as important, while if you set up the experience as a cliffhanger, you trick your brain into pondering the unfinished train of thought, both as you try to fall asleep and the moment you wake up and realize you want to finish the train of thought... it's like you get to pick one low effort memorizable deep insight per day (you could reach more during the day, but those require higher level of effort, and don't reside in the uncertain or pondering phase long enough to subconsciously gain importance, we remember our big breakthroughs not our smaller ones, and when you know you will read the answer in a few seconds your brain exerts less effort in pondering the questionn)

I don't know about common, but it just follows the pattern of "drink oneself into a stupor".

Alizarin Crimson is so predictably shit for lightfastness that it's (apparently) actually used to calibrate lightfastness checking.

Cennini's "The Craftsman's Handbook" as well as Leonardo Da Vinci's "Treatise on Painting" are pretty good books from the 1400s and 1500s.

They use oil and egg as medium instead of acrylic, but the interesting chemistry starting from a piece of rock or whatever is great to nerd out on.

I’m fully into that, thanks for the tip!

I found Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay a really fun book to read about natural colorants and their history.

If you are interested in color, pigments and paint from an artist's standpoint, I strongly recommend Tad Spurgeon's blog and his book "Living Craft"[1]. The book delves into not just classic and modern pigments and their combinations (palettes) for painting, but also many variants of and recipes for binders (paint == binder + pigment), most notably hand-refined linseed oil, which can apparently be made to dry much faster and be relatively more permanent than most commercial oils. Not always scientific but always thoughtful and surprising, the book is a very enjoyable reference for a hardcore paint geek.

Spurgeon reminds me of Knuth, in a dedicate-your-life-to-an-extremely-deep-inquiry sort of way. The book was an investment (I think I paid 80 US), but one I definitely haven't regretted.

[1] https://www.tadspurgeon.com/the_book.php?page=the+book

Thanks for that info. Colours and pigments interest me but it's something i've never actually had much experience with. I always thought art was something I just wasn't good at so.I never took any art classes in high school or anything. My biggest introduction to colour mixing has been at my job mixing pigmented resins in epoxy and matching it to different colours of stone for laminating.

This job actually started getting me into more visual arts in general I started with stone carving and i've been getting into learning to draw.

I find the two processes somewhat similar but opposite. Carving is subtractive taking something and removing material until you get your desired shape. Whereas drawing is additive. You start with nothing and use lines and values to create your shapes. The forms and the way you study them are very much the same though.

I haven't gotten into painting yet. But i've been doing some digital painting of my drawings and i've been playing with water colour pencils a bit.

One thing that seems to confuse me though. I've got a couple sets from a two different manufacturers. There's a couple of the same colours between the two sets but I notice they don't seem to match. This works well as it gives me more colour range but i'm just not sure if this would be because of different amounts of binder or different pigments used to produce the colour.

Either way the more i've learned the more I wish i'd taken the time to learn about this when I was younger.

Pigments are used more for paints, and I don't believe that markers and watercolor pencils base their naming on them. I've got a set of Derwent Inktense 'watercolour' pencils, and the naming is rather whimsical, and does not correspond to any pigments I know of. It's the same with markers usually.

But that is okay, the reason to stick with pigments for mixing, is it gives you maximum mixing power from as few colors as possible. When pencils come in sets of 36, 72 or sometimes 150, you will never be too far away from the shade you need anyway.

If you want pigment based watercolor pencils, I would recommend looking into the Daniel Smith Watercolor Sticks. They are named correctly, and most have single pigments. They can be used as a pencil, and are a mix between pastels and watercolor pencils. A strange hybrid but they might be right up your alley.

Just be aware of Cadmium safety issues, as with many other art materials. People can mistakenly treat art supplies like they are completely non-toxic, and that is a mistake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadmium_pigments#Safety

No other yellow comes close to the opacity of cadmium though. Unless you ingest it, I'm pretty sure the toxicity is a minor point.

For watercolors where you want transparency, Hansa Yellow (PY3) is a better choice, and is not toxic.

> Unless you ingest it, I'm pretty sure the toxicity is a minor point.

Inhalation is also a risk: i.e., no sanding or spray application, unless you have a good filter mask and spray hood. When in doubt, the MSDS for the material in question is your friend.

I've used cheap metallic spray paint without a mask and got quite dizzy and an odd aftertase, multiple times. I wonder was in those no-name wun hung lo products.

The acrylic based aerosols marketed for art aren't nearly that bad, although it's the solvent that's still a problem and requires a mask for heavy duty use, of course.

>Unless you ingest it

Right. Typically painters of my acquaintance e.g. in college had paint all over their clothes and hands, and then they would smoke or eat a snack, transferring traces to their lips.

Cadmium sulfide is maybe not nearly as bad as elemental Cadmium, which is horrible.

All I am saying is please be careful, be safe.

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2013/05/08/th...

“... this is one of those metals that’s best avoided for life. It has acute toxic effects, chronic toxic effects, and if there are any effects in between those it probably has them, too. Fortunately, cadmium is not well absorbed from the gut...”

Liquitex has a pretty good line of cadmium free alternatives in their heavy body acrylics.

http://www.liquitex.com/cadmium-free/

They are very secretive about what goes into those paints, they don't list the pigments on the tube, and when asked state it is a 'proprietary formula, developed over several years of extensive R&D'.

Not that I don't trust them, or could A/B test them myself. They actually performed an A/B test as part of their marketing sending out 2 tubes to artists labeled... A and B.

Do they make PB29 in raw form? I didn't see it last time I was in Kremer's in NYC (I use egg).

I've been getting into acrylics recently. I'm wondering why you recommend Ivory/Carbon Black over Iron/Mars Black? I currently only have Mars Black so I'm curious how Carbon Black is different.

Purely to avoid confusion. Ivory black is present in most starting sets, wheras Mars Black is the non-default black.

They have very slightly different color temperatures

A decade ago I did an iPhone app based on the ultramarine pigment:

http://ikleinblue.com/

It was rejected by Apple: http://speedanatomy.blogspot.com/2010/01/ikleinblue-rejected...

One of the oldest exemplars of the use of lapis lazuli is "Ram in the Thicket", a pair of statues that date back to sometime between 2600-2400 BC. [0][1][2]. They're extremely intricate and, unfortunately, photographs don't do them justice. One of the pair is at the University of Pennsylvania and the other is at the British Museum.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_in_a_Thicket

[1] https://britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collect...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1920&bi...

It's kind of funny how much your perception of old art changes once you know about the value of the blue pigment. If you don't know, the Scrovegni Chapel is just a very blue chapel. If you do, it becomes a ridiculous display of wealth.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrovegni_Chapel

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47QgqdeSi0U

Just heard an interesting story[1] on NPR recently about scientists who were studying teeth in medieval skeletons and found Lapis Lazuli in a woman's teeth. This led them to the hypothesis that she was a scribe and that the residue in her teeth came from her putting a paint brush in her mouth.

The upshot of the article is about rethinking the traditional notion that all/most scribes in the middle ages were merry old monks. But they do describe what Lapis Lazuli is and what it was used for back then.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/01/09/6832839...

How successful in industry are these "please subscribe" popups that come up after about 5 seconds?

Does anyone really subscribe? Is the conversion rate really significantly greater than about 0%? I have never once put my email address into the box and have a hard time imagining anyone doing so -- yet these popup boxes persist.

Very.

Our email signups jumped by ~10% when we started using them. And the bounce rate increase was negligible.

I despise them as much as you do, but they work.

I've actually come to the conclusion that we have people come to our website just to get the popup to subscribe to our newsletter. I blows my mind. However, I've known for a while that it is a mistake to think that my views are representative of normal people ;-)

I only suppose that the bounce rate is much higher than the email conversion rate.

I find it jarring and it makes me less likely to want to read whatever it was I clicked the link for. In some cases I find it so annoying that I consider my options for avoiding that site again altogether. Then again I seem to be pickier than most.

I always wanted to read a book on the history of pigments and other artist supplies from a chemistry perspective. In particular, how they were found, isolated and used.

Try "Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Colour" by Phillip Ball. [0]. If you're just interested in the colour blue there's also "Blue: The History of a Color" by Michel Pastoureau [1]. The Pastoureau book is more of an overview of art history than a discussion of the history underlying the discovery of the pigment itself.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Bright-Earth-Art-Invention-Color/dp/0...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Blue-History-Color-Michel-Pastoureau/...

Oh cool I will check those out for sure thanks!

If you like a fictional tale of such a thing i can recommend the smart, fun Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore. :)

Thanks, that looks fun. I haven't read one of Moore's books since Practical Demonkeeping, which I enjoyed immensely.

I cannot read about lapis without being reminded of this tidbit:

"In the middle of the room, set into the lapis lazuli floor, is the foundation stone of the Home of FIFA."

https://www.fifa.com/about-fifa/home-of-fifa/fifa-headquarte...

I've heard that one of the reasons that ancient paintings kept their colors for so long is because they got them from grinding up the stones like Lapis. Not sure how they make the modern colors but apparently they fade a lot faster. Some of these older paintings are hundreds of years old and still look fresh, which is pretty impressive.

I recommend the song Lazuli by the band Beach House very much.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvwl7INZykc

Lapis Lazuli also plays a big role in the film "Land of the Enlightened" where you get to see kids run the show for once :)

Interesting article but the article does not say how much was Lapis Lazuli was worth vs gold. The author gets away with "... often prized over gold...". If Lapis Lazuli was valued only once over gold in its entire history, then statement is true, which isn't really useful info. Click-bait title much?

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