The world of colours

The world of colours is truly fascinating.

Colours bring out the uniqueness of an object and the beauty we see is enhanced: it’s magical.

The painters of ancient Egypt discovered the first synthetic colour, a bright blue called the Egyptian blue. They created it by mixing limestone with sand and copper containing minerals such as azurite and malachite.

Blue is one of the rarest colours in nature. We know that the sky and the sea don’t really have a blue pigment. Even blue eyes aren’t actually blue, they simply lack the pigment that makes eyes brown.

Colours are visible thanks to the light. Some of the wave lengths from the sun are visible, the longest one looks like red light and as it shortens it looks gradually like orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. The white light is the mixing of all these wave lengths, as happens with sun light. While black is not a colour, it’s the absence of colour; and yet, it’s still captivating and so necessary for an artist, that Leonardo da Vinci chose to list it as a colour, as he wrote in his Trattato della Pittura (Vol. 1).

Pigments absorb some wave lengths and reflect others that come back to the eye. And these are the colours that we see. But with black all the wave lengths are absorbed and nothing is reflected.

Personally I love all the colours although my favourites are red and blue, as you can notice from my paintings on my website

https://lucia-waterson.pixels.com/art

You are welcome to visit, comment or shop, if you like 🙂 Thank you and stay safe!

Lucia Waterson (34)

I write poems (exclusively in Italian). What I love in working with colours is that it's a direct language with no barriers. And I like how it brings me into my dreamworld.
I'm fond in particular of nature, because in its beauty there is love and hope.

I started a new series of artworks Weird but True, because many times nature can be quite bizarre! And the first one, Nature's palette, is already uploaded, you can see it in my website https://lucia-waterson.pixels.com/

I also started a new series of artworks, in which I select news from all over the world and I recount them to you through my eyes and my (he)art. We can take this ongoing journey together if you keep visiting. The first artwork is already uploaded, it's called Touching the sky.

Thank you very much! Lucia Waterson