Where does the colour blue come from?
I know about reflection of light and all that..but if blues a primary colour, where do they get it from? You can’t make it?
Red comes from the tropical Cochineal beetle but what about blue? Does it sprout out of the ground like oil? Do they steal it from rainbows?
How can they make blue paint if you cant mix anything to get it? Or food colouring (once again, this comes from the red-bug)…just a thought…I’m also confused about yellow.
blue orriginally came from Egypt
because of the blood of some beatles and the colours they could get.
absolutly beautifull rich blue if you look in the old egyptian art work.. fabulouse!
its symbolic and deep and has lots of hystorical values.
its one of the oldest colours first used by man xxx
Oh, blue comes from all the sadness and melancholly in the world, all condensed until it turns blue. The despairing souls of blues musicians. or just regular folks on a bad day, you know. So next time you’re depressed, just look out the window. Not at the indigo stripe in the rainbow, but at Sherwin Williams, as he steals a piece of your dreary pathetic soul.
Colors are just different wavelengths of light. When you see an object that is a “color”, it is absorbing all wavelengths of light except for the one color you are seeing, but you probably already knew that.
There are millions of chemicals out there that absorb different wavelengths of light and therefore have different colors. You mention one chemical from a beetle that looks red. That is one of let’s say 1085 known organic chemicals that look red. It’s not the only one! There are simply chemicals that cover all colors of the spectrum, and there are thousands of chemicals that reflect blue and absorb other colors due to their electron orbital configuration.
Colors, in a physical and chemical sense, are not “just” made from primary pigments (cyan, magenta, yellow-CMY) or light (red green blue-RGB). Those just happen to be the colors that human eyes can see, so we “trick” ourselves into seeing all colors by mixing combinations of them. It has little to do with the physics of color and more to do with the biology of the human eye. It’s cheap and easy for a paint company or an LCD company to just find the primary pigments or primary light colors to produce all their colors by mixing them. That’s not to say that you have to have primary colors to make other colors. You can start with an orange chemical to make orange–you don’t need to mix reds and yellows to do it. If humans had different eyes, we’d be using different primary paint colors, but the physics of color and the chemicals that reflect specific colors would be the same.
P.S. Sorry if this is confusing, but it’s not your fault. The true primary pigment colors are cyan yellow and magenta. They don’t teach this in school because they fear that those big words will confuse kids. So instead, they figure that blue is close to cyan and red is similar to magenta and they tell you that red blue and yellow are the primary colors, but it’s not true. Color printers actually make “blue” by mixing magenta and cyan dyes. The magenta and cyan primary colors are made by finding large organic chemicals that just happen to absorb green (looks magenta) and red (looks cyan) light. When you mix them, they absorb both green and red, and what’s left over is blue (because the primary light colors are red, green, and blue–take away red and green and you have blue left over). It actually makes sense when you learn it correctly, but nobody will teach it correctly, so it’s not your fault.