MetaFilter posts tagged with color and history

Ancient Oases

homunculus — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 13:12:29 -0800

handprint: watercolors & watercolor painting

ijoshua — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 09:14:40 -0800

i began cataloging the colors, and put the color list on the web. over time, the paint catalog turned into a web site.

Holy snails!

blahblahblah — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 22:26:42 -0800

A rabbi, some snails, the color purple, and a 1,500 year old mystery. By puzzling through various sources, a group of researchers and religious scholars think they have found in the mollusk Murex trunculus the source of a purplish dye that was used in ancient Jewish ceremonies over a millennia and a half ago. Murex has been used for the last 3,600 years to make Imperial or Tyrian Purple, a key color in the ancient world. There are many other pigments with their own interesting stories as well.

I've always felt that the past was somehow obscured by being viewed solely through a greyscale window

magullo — Fri, 16 Jan 2004 02:45:33 -0800

Dazzling, full-color shots of people long since dead, landscapes long since paved, and an empire long since overthrown.
A pre-WW I process for creating color image projections meets Photoshop®

Virtual Colour Museum

taz — Sun, 09 Nov 2003 04:31:31 -0800

The Virtual Colour Museum presents Colour Order Systems in Art and Science: "a complete cultural history of colour", including illustrated explanations of 59 colour theories from antiquity to modern time, plus the significance of colours in various cultural systems (click the small images to enlarge), and a "virtual colour-space" dedicated to illustrating the spherical colour system construction of early 19th century painter Philipp Otto Runge. Walk this way >>

jwells — Mon, 07 May 2001 08:46:11 -0800

Early (around 1910) amazing COLOR photographs from Russia by Prokudin-Gorskii, photographer for the Czar. He essentially had three cameras, each with a separate Red, Green, or Blue filter, and snapped the same shot at the same time. So all the "reds" were recorded, in B&W, on one photographic plate, and likewise down the line. Then he could use the filters to recreate the scene and project it onto a screen in color. (more inside) (props to slashdot for the link)