Blue Tuesday/Wednesday

I started writing this post on Tuesday, which stretched into today due to the complexity of the subject, so the title was adapted for my own reality 😊

The colour blue is wildly popular around the world, but I have to confess that it’s not one of my favourites. I find it generally cold, and never decorate with it. There are a handful of shades I like, and may occasionally dress in them, but most blues don’t suit my colouring at all and usually make me look ill, unless I supplement them with another shade like white or orange.

I find shades of blue in nature fascinating, though – blue skies and blue flowers, the varied shades of water and midnight blue sapphires. In fact, this post was prompted by the gorgeous Hyacinth Macaws I saw last week at the Nashville Zoo. These birds come from central and eastern South America, and are both the largest macaw and the largest species of flying parrot. Sadly, their beauty has made them increasing victims of the exotic pet trade, and they’re listed as Vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature‘s Red List.

Blue is considered a primary colour, i.e. one of the colours that, along with red and yellow, is a parent of all other colours. You can mix blue and yellow to make green, or blue and red to make purple, for example, but there are no colours to mix to make blue. Different shades of blue can be made by mixing colours, and Mother Nature still has incomparable skills in creating wonderful shades of a colour that can be considered anything from soothing to depressing.

We see blue via light with a dominant wavelength between approximately 450 and 495 nanometres. All blue is said to contain tinges of other colours, from the purplish-blue of flowers to the greenish-blue of the sea.

For millennia artists have strived to capture shades of blue. One of the most challenging has always been the blue of the sky. Mother Nature hasn’t made it easy to copy her. “Sky blue” as a colour we can reproduce officially has a Red/Green/Blue (one of the coding systems for producing colours) value of 173, 216, 230, as illustrated in the graphic below. But our skies are fickle, changing shades from almost white to deep blue and violet at their whim.

Our perception of blue, as well as other colours, depends largely on our reference point. The farther away an object is, the more blue it appears, such as the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque, New Mexico. This effect is called atmospheric perspective – the farther away an object is from the viewer, like mountains, the less contrast there is between the object and its background colour, as in a blue sky. It makes for wonderful photos. In paintings, cooler colours, like blue, seem more distant, whereas warmer colours like red appear closer. For taking photographs, if you want the sky to be more blue in your resulting picture, make sure you have your back to the sun; if you shoot into the sunlight, your background sky will be bleached of colour.

A survey through ten countries found that blue is the most popular “favorite color” for people in the world. It seems that men preferred the color blue more often than women, which may partially explain its historic use in high-ranking professions (religious, military, business…), which were up until modern times held exclusively by men. Color psychology tells us that:

• Because blue is so popular, it’s often viewed as non-threatening.
• Blue is often described as peaceful, tranquil, secure, and orderly. It can feel calming and relaxing.
• Blue is considered both conservative and traditional. As such, it’s seen as a sign of stability and reliability, and is used in advertising by businesses and organizations that want to project an image of security.
• Some shades of blue, depending on how they’re used, can create feelings of sadness or loneliness. Our culture often refers to moments of feeling down as feeling ‘blue’.

The earliest shade of artistic blue was made by the ancient Egyptians, who valued the colour highly. With the scarcity of minerals containing the colour, such as azurite, they sought a way to produce it artificially. No written records were left of how they did it, but a Roman writer from the first century BC described approximately how it was produced by grinding copper, natron (a naturally-occurring deposit that, with its preservative properties, was also used in the mummification process), and alkaline sand that contained lime. The mixture was then heated in a furnace to produce the colouring material. Sadly, the original process was lost, but scientists have worked to approximate it in modern times.

Interestingly, the ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t have a word for the color blue. If you’ve heard of the Greek writer Homer’s prose in his famous Iliad, describing the sea as ‘wine-dark’ or ‘wine-red’, now you know why. For Homer, the sea was “wine-red”. Nevertheless, blue was clearly all around them, including the Romans’ conquest of the Celtic tribes of Europe, who tinted their bodies blue with dye from the woad plant when preparing for battle. Descriptions of rainbows omitted the colour blue, but there are examples of blue-tinted clothing from that time period in artwork found in places like Pompeii.

Blue dye for textiles in antiquity came from the crop Indigofera tinctoria, a plant in the bean family that was cultivated in East Asia, India, Bangladesh, Egypt, and across the ocean in Peru. It was transported via the ancient Silk Road.

During the Renaissance, ultramarine blue was made by grinding the stone lapis lazuli into a powder. If ground too finely, however, it turned a dull grey. As a result, it was so expensive that it was worth more than gold, and was the finest shade used by painters, reserved for only the most important subjects, generally those with religious merit like the Virgin Mary. There was even a shade called Marian Blue that was used for her garments.

For the same reason, blue was often used in illustrated manuscripts and stained glass windows to denote holiness. The artist Cennino Cennini gushed that “Ultramarine blue is a colour illustrious, beautiful, and most perfect, beyond all other colours; one could not say anything about it or do anything with it, that its quality would not still surpass.”

One of the most beautiful examples of the use of blue is found in one of the most famous extant books from the Golden Age of illuminated manuscripts. In the Middle Ages, following the fall of the Roman Empire, books were created out of hand-lettered sheets of parchment or vellum, with hand-painted decorative flourishes, often in the margins and borders but sometimes throughout the page. The sheets were then bound into books called codices (or codex for a single book).

Originally books typically served a religious purpose – psalms, Bibles, and a very popular collection of prayers used to mark the observance of canonical hours (regular times throughout the day to spend praying) that was called a Book of Hours. Wealthy patrons could commission richly-illustrated Books of Hours, often from a monastery (produced by the labour of its monks over several weeks), but also by independent illustrators.

One of the historical characters in my upcoming urban fantasy series, The Chaos Roads Trilogy (Book 1 to be published soon on Kindle and other suppliers), is a young monk who becomes just such a manuscript illustrator at an obscure priory in Wales, then ends up travelling the world after the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII leaves him without a job or home. The protagonist of the books is herself a professional archivist, specializing in illuminated manuscripts.

The most famous Book of Hours is an incomplete folio produced for the Duke of Berry, a bibliophile who commissioned a lavish Book from a Dutch trio of brothers. The manuscript, called the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, was made on vellum (fine quality calfskin), and painted in vivid colours, particularly multiple shades of blue. Below you can see one stunning page, The Nativity of Jesus, folio 44v, with Mary’s robes in brilliant ultramarine and white, and the Lord looking down from a deep-blue celestial perch. The book was never finished because the brothers and the Duke all died, possibly from the plague.

The Coat of Arms of St. Patrick Cathedral in Dublin contains rich shades of blue. I haven’t been able to find a description of the Coat of Arms and what it represents; the nearest information I was able to uncover is that, apart from the frequent use of blue to denote holiness, according to a 13th century manuscript, St. Patrick wore blue robes.

In the age of sea voyages, Spanish explorers discovered an American species of indigo and began to cultivate the product in Guatemala, spreading to English and French colonies in the West Indies. It was then introduced into colonial South Carolina in the U.S. and became a valuable cash crop upon the backs of the slaves who were forced to cultivate it. It made up more than a third of the value of all exports from the American colonies before the Revolutionary War changed things.

One of the most famous colours of blue, which has become ubiquitous in modern society, is Navy Blue, named after the dark blue worn by officers in the British Royal Navy, and then adopted by other navies in the world. All of these use Indigo dye as a base, and navy blue has become a symbol of authority, even in modern business settings, where it’s considered a ‘power colour’ to dress in.

There are four different classifications of indigo colour. It’s mostly associated with a very dark blue, as seen in the denim of blue jeans, but a more purplish version called Electric Indigo (see colour chart above) has become the colour of Spiritualism because it sits between blue and violet and thus represents colours of psychic abilities as well as the sixth chakra, which is said to include the Third Eye.

In the 18th century, someone finally discovered a way to manufacture a blue pigment, called Prussian Blue. It’s believed that Prussian Blue was synthesized for the first time around 1706 by a paint maker named Johann Jacob Diesbach in Berlin, and was the first stable and relatively light-fast synthetic blue pigment since the knowledge of making of Egyptian blue was lost. Prussian Blue became widely used by Japanese artists, particularly Katsushika Hokusai in his famous Great Wave. Famous contemporary artist Pablo Picasso used the colour during his ‘blue period’, when he was suffering from depression over the suicide of one of his close friends.

Blue is considered to be a rare colour in nature, but every time I look up at the blue sky (although as I write this my sky is a dull winter grey) that hangs over us I feel I might dispute that assertion. Included below are some of the many other places I’ve found that Nature likes to use blue, and these are just a small sampling that I have photos of.

The colour blue can reflect many moods, from the happiness of a bright sunny sky, to the serenity of soft blue living and working spaces, to the murky and frightening darkness of deep ocean and the heaviness of melancholy.

The colour blue can reflect many moods, from the happiness of a bright sunny sky, to the serenity of soft blue living and working spaces, to the murky and frightening darkness of deep ocean and the heaviness of melancholy.

Its production has gone through many phases and turns of politics and economics. Blue gems have always held a certain mystique, particularly sapphires. (You can read about seven famous sapphires in history here.)

Blue eyes are a recessive trait, which means that both parents must carry the gene for blue eyes. Even then, if the gene for brown eyes is present, brown eyes will always dominate unless the child gets the gene for blue eyes from both parents. Blue eyes are particularly striking when we see them, although pale blue eyes can appear cold and calculating. People with blue eyes are somewhat luckier than those with darker eyes because studies have found that they release less melatonin in the winter and accordingly are less prone to winter depression.

Blue contrasts and compliments several other colours.

Blue has been a tried-and-true burst of colour in the decorative arts, even in outdoor spaces.

For novelists, blue is a colour that has a wide range of connotations, and is part of the rich collection of words and descriptions that we have as one of our tools to bring our stories to life. I hope you enjoyed this brief look at a fascinating colour, and for more information about the publication of my first book, including sneak previews of the cover and contents, as well as more fascinating tidbits about writing and inspiration, please sign up for my upcoming newsletter (check back for the opt-in form, coming shortly!)

All photos are by me unless otherwise specified, and may not be used without my express permission.