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Poetic colour names
#1
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I'll put here this borderline off topic post.

   I came upon this in an art store today, an oil paint colour labeled 'Caput Mortuum', and was thinking, Adam, that it could be a decent side hustle for you to act as a consultant for an (established? emerging?) pigment/art supply company in creating an 'alchemical' line of colours, the Thrice-Great, or Peacock's Tail series, say. I say that in jest, but I almost bought the colour today on name alone.

   One could come up with a few dozen evocative names, I’m sure, just from Ashmole's Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum. Just around the treatises of Ripley are mentions of the 'Blackest Black' as being like a "Cimmerian utter Darkness of compleat Rottenness", which, admittedly, sounds less like an oil paint colour than a black metal concept album; but Lyon Green, Terra Foliata, Toad fully Ruddy, Crow's bill Blue as lead ('Crowys byll bloe as lede'), etc., that could hold unto a small tube label. 

   And it would be very poetic to walk into a studio (or watch a YouTube video) and hear the artist explain: "How did I made the colour on that section? Easy, you just mix two parts of White Eagles with one part of Splendor Solis."


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#2
Interesting comment here by Professor de Beer:

https://www.oldholland.com/academy/prof-...reloaded=1
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#3
Both the post and the image remind me of the "Ask if you can have a tin of Striped Paint" April Fool's pranks of my youth.
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#4
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The first two comments by H. de Beer could be plausible origins of the term (the third one is silly) : a) Colcothar/'Golcotha', and b) the pigment from mummies, which was a thing back then:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown


And, Paul, for the colour chips of artist's oils, they usually give them a stroke at one end with a hog bristle brush in order to show their relative transparency/opacity.


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