I know the basics that I learnt in kindergarten of course, but beyond that, after years of majoring in photography at university, colours to me are broken up into cyan/red, magenta/green and yellow/blue.
This has been a bit of a problem when listing items online, trying to describe colours. But, I have a new best (website) friend; Wikipedia's List of Colours. It helps me differentiate between persimmon and terracotta, between sea green and forest green, between cobalt blue and royal blue.
I'm slowly learning!
17 comments:
of course there is a problem with that too... unless the rest of us check out the dictionary ..we have no clue what colour you are describing either..hahhahahha.....
and, then what about how colours are set up on various monitors..it still isn't easy to convey the "real" colour of anything....
sometimes I just go for the old fashioned terms myself... mostly it gets me by... like, oh, say.... bluish/green....versus greenish/blue...etc...cuz the one is more blue than green and vice versa....
okay.... on that note, I am off to check out Wik's colours.........
You're not the only one Melanie! I haven't a clue most of the time - my colour descriptors tend to be as straightforward as "yellow, orange, red, pink, black, white, blue, green, grey, brown, black, purple". Must go straight to that list!
What a fantastic resource even including the hex triplet. I would never have thought to look there.
From that list, my favourite name is Papaya whip and who would have thought that school bus yellow is an actual colour?
People say "cyan" and I have no idea whether that is blue or pink.
Thanks for that link!
Then some colours are so close that depending on the light which one is it. I told my friend, also an artist, I was painting my fence a kind of turquoise colour. When she saw it she said thats not turquoise it's jade. To me jade is moere of a deep green.... colour names evoke different responses. thank goodness we now have a reference to settle any arguments!
Reminds me of when I used to work with a boutique children's wear designer in New York and we were debating whether to name one of our fabric swatches "moss green" or "Lichen". I liked Lichen myself. :-)
Periwinkle has always been a favourite in my Crayola book. :-))
That's a great website! I'm very much a basic colour person - red, blue, green, yellow, orange etc the usual culprits. I do now include sky blue in my basic colour vocabulary...it's an extremely popular colour with my students and they tell me off when I say, oh you mean blue?!!
Oh goodness - me either!!! And I have an even worse confession. I don't know colours, and I don't really know fabric types either, which is terrible as I use so much reclaimed fabric in my bags. I usually take the fabric pieces to a friend who knows her textiles, and ask her what she thinks it is so I can describe it in my bag listing. I wonder if there is a website for this as well? Or maybe I need to spend some serious time hanging out in fabric stores, just learning to identify fabrics :P So anyway, thanks heaps for the colour link - at least now I can become more proficient in one area!!!!
you always find cool & handy links! thanks!!
im usually OK with colours but clueless when it comes to plants & flowers - i wish I knew the names!
That's a fantastic link. I never have any idea of the proper way to describe colours. I don't think I'll find any of my common descriptions like "sort of light blueish, greenish" in there!
Yeah, well, I wanna know who made Cosmic Latte an official color!!! :p
thanks for the link! great idea! just bookmarked it!
An official list of colours!!!! Cool!
Excellent link, thanks! I've actually been looking for a list like this for a particular colour that I didn't know the name for - now I do: Cerulean!
Oh I just went and took a look...what a great site!
Terisa
Hmmm.... how long do you think Wikipedia's list will last? I don't know if there is such a thing anymore as a standard list of colors. I worked at Home Depot for awhile, in their paint department and it seems like naming new colors is part of the whole business of selling the same color in a new package, depending on what is fashionable in foods, seasons or whatever... I also worked at a fabric store that caters to quilters and companies were constantly replacing color standards with new ones.
So, we are basically all confused.
I just found your blog and it's great! That wiki page is awsome.
I'll be back:)
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