True Blue

The monitor for my first computer system only supported 8-bit color, so it displayed just 256 colors. That sounds like a lot, but it was really limiting. Many colors don’t make the cut when only 256 are allowed to play ball. At the time, I would have loved to have had a monitor that displayed “millions” of colors, but that was way, way, way more expensive; so I settled for 256. I wasn’t the first artist to make that cost-benefit analysis.

I think it is pretty safe to assume that artists have always wanted more and more colors. Even caveman illustrators probably cursed their limited palette (earth tones, only earth tones). During the Renaissance, the most precious pigment was blue. Made from ground lapis lazuli, it was worth more than its weight in gold. To say the least, it was used sparingly. As this article on Huffington Post relates, the accidental discovery by a German chemist of the first synthetic pigment, Prussian blue, not only made painting more colorful, but also changed the nature of painting itself. Cheaper manufactured pigments meant more colors were available at a lower cost. The carefully planned and painstakingly executed jewel tones of the Renaissance would eventually give way to the spontaneous works of the Impressionists.

Luckily for me, all my later systems have supported millions of colors. And, unlike many of my predecessors I didn’t have to mix any those new colors by hand; I just had to upgrade hardware.