Where Do Our Color Names Come From?

Detail shot of Cadmium Yellow Medium R&F Pigment Stick®.

Quinacridone Red, Green Earth, Dianthus Pink, Ancient Gold...all great names, but where do they come from? To understand where we get many of the R&F color names you'll need to open your history books. The names are most commonly derived from the pigment that makes up each color (and in our case multiple pigment mixes), but not always. Each one is unique, and many have backstories as rich as the colors themselves.

We’ll go into further depth of the individual color names in newsletters to come, but to preface the topic we’ll take an abbreviated look into the history of color and some of the notable breakthroughs in pigment discovery. We recommend “Painting Materials” by Gettens & Stout for further reading.

Coloring materials from animal (think Sepia), vegetable (e.g. indigo), and mineral sources have been used for personal adornment, decorating, and for making pictures as early as remote prehistoric times. Most easily procurable were vegetable colors, flowers, seeds, berries, nuts, bark, wood, and roots of plants.

Prussian Blue, the first modern synthetic pigment.

These were widely used but many were fugitive and faded quickly (e.g. Sap Green) and have since been replaced by alternative materials, retaining their original namesake (you may see the term “hue” used to signify this). Only slightly less available were the colored earths (e.g. Ochres and Umbers) that abound on the earth's surface in sedimentary deposits. Less readily available were the colored minerals of metals (Azurite, Malachite, Lapis Lazuli and later Cadmiums). The first years of the 18th century mark the beginning of modern synthetic pigments (such as Prussian Blue, and later Zinc, Cobalt, and Chromium). Synthetic being not found in nature. As you can see, each of these discoveries brought forth new color and color names still referenced and used today.

Ancient Gold encaustic. The word ancient brings to mind relics from the distant past.

Then there are colors named based not on the specifics of their makeup or source, but more so to their overall context. We’ll save these details for our upcoming newsletters, but we hope this has you interested and ready to hear more!