As another year closes, many bloggers are creating their Best of 2007 lists. My top choice in color this year isn’t a specific hue, palette, or pattern. The most vibrant example of a color community I experienced in 2007 was the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennessee.

by muzikspy

The photo above is of The Flaming Lips’ midnight-performance on Saturday of Bonnaroo, where super-heroes passed out piercing, red lazer-pointers to nearly 10,000 eager fans. The crowd was sea of bizarre costumes, balloons, bodies, and sweeping alien-blue lights, all crossed and marked by thousands of brilliant red lines. On stage, the equipment was painted bright orange, with outlines of yellow. A gang of fuzzy, red suit Santas cheered on the right, while on the left a group of green-headed aliens kicked and danced from the bottom of their white, feminine stockings to the top of their short, purple skirts.

Insane Amounts of Celebration

Although Bonnaroo has gotten too crowded, too publicized, too expensive, and unfortunately branded as a drug playground, the festival still beckons some of America’s youngest artists to celebrate the power of music.

by joshunter

Nestled in the Tennessee hills, Bonnaroo doesn’t give artists a chance to present their work, especially now that RV campers are excluded from the regular campers, as much as it gathers artists to remind them that there are thousands of like-minded individuals scattered all over the greater midwest, and even the world.

When we talk of colors, we can't help but be multilingual. Our pictorial world tour of exotic color names continues on through Italy, France, and Greece. For previous multilingual colors, see Multicolored, Multilingual Part I.

 

Flower (top) by atomicshark. Amethyst (above) by Starfires.

Amethyst. The opposite of "chartreuse" (the name of a pale green liqueur), "amethyst" means "not drunken" in its original Greek. The violet/purple quartz stone was so-named because it was popularly believed to prevent inebriation.

 

by hartlandmartin.

Verdigris. The name of this bright blue-green colour is derived from an Old French phrase meaning "green of Greece." It refers to the patina on copper, bronze and brass. In the musical "Wicked," verdigris is the color of the Wicked Witch Elphaba.

When we talk of colors, we can't help but be multilingual. Our world tour of exotic color names continues on through Italy, England, Greece, and Iran. Let's take a pictorial tour of these colorful cultures, in search of an exotic blue metamorphic rock that yields a bright pigment when crushed.

 

by Brian J. Geiger.

Magenta is named in honor of the town in northern Italy where the bloodlike purplish red dye was discovered.

Warm, romantic, rich, enlivening, homey, flattering to the complexion, prayerful, even mysterious and mystical—there's nothing quite like the atmospheric glow of candlelight. Though typically classified as yellow or golden, a flickering candle flame actually exhibits all the colors of the rainbow. A touch of candlelight can offer emotional appeal, a festive air, or a seductive sparkle to virtually any color palette.

Mirrored flame (top) by Jonathan Assink. Leaning flame (above) by photo-artiste.

According to Celtic lore, candlelight is the only illumination hospitable to shadow. "The ideal light to befriend the darkness, it gently opens up caverns in the darkness and prompts the imagination into activity. The candle allows the darkness to keep its secrets. There is shadow and color within every candle flame" (Anam Cara, A Book of Celtic Wisdom, 1997).

Stray rays of sunlight bouncing inside the lens barrel of a camera leave ghostly trails of stars, glowing halos, subtle rainbows, and specular orbs. Photographers may abhor these secondary traces of light, but lens flares serve a purpose: they create a sense of depth, focus intensity, provide an accent, and lend a dreamy glow to the scenario. The colors of lens flares are typically bright, desaturated, somewhat foggy, and somehow ethereal. Their charm lies in their uncontrolled, unpremeditated, and exuberant nature. Lens flares represent light at play within the tools we use to capture it. They offer brilliant highlights beyond our normal reach.

A ghostly green spectral crescent and pink aura of the moon inspired this palette. by Chealion.

When we talk of colors, we're often speaking French. Many of our most exotic color names are of French origin. Let's take a pictorial tour of the colorful French countryside, where we'll encounter drunken monasteries, burrowing insectivorous mammals, jumping blood-sucking insects, earthy shadows, juicy fruits, and edible ornamentals.

by Funky Coda.

Umber is derived from the French phrase "terre d'ombre," literally "earth of shadow." Raw umber is a dark yellow brown pigment, while burnt umber is roasted to a dark brown.

 

by Oklahoma State University.

Puce is of French origin and literally means "flea" color. Puce is purplish-brown or dark red.

Our friends over at ApartmentTherapy.com are putting their third annual fall colors contest to see who has the most color loving home. Win Up To $2500 from a total of $7500 in prizes to be awarded! - Thanks to subsomatic for reminding us.

How colorful is your home?

WHAT: Our Fall Colors Contest is a contest for all color lovers. We're looking for the boldest, most beautiful, most colorful home in the world.

WHY: Color is a powerful part of interior design, and the cheapest way to change a room, but few feel comfortable using it. To inspire confidence, we're going to share all of the best color homes, tips and sources, worldwide.

I've Got Color! - Fall Colors Contest 2007

Though it has been depicted countless times on stage and screen, the marvelous land of Oz has an original and quite inventive color palette. The genuine colors of the yellow brick road, the field of poppies, the Cowardly Lion's mane, the flying monkeys, Toto, and the great Emerald City are preserved in the very first printing of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). That edition of the book is preserved in the Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division, available for on-line viewing with extraordinarily high quality scans.

"The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was an innovative book not least because of the twenty four full colour plates and myriad monochromatic illustrations in which the colour changed according to the location in the story (Kansas = grey, Emerald City = green and so on). With the illustrative vignettes often encroaching on the text area, the type was cleverly printed over the top of the coloured images" (BiblioOdyssey).

Without further ado, here are the official colors of this beloved classic.

 

About the Guest Author, Craig Conley
Website: http://www.OneLetterWords.com
Craig is an independent scholar and author of dozens of strange and unusual books, including a unicorn field guide and a dictionary of magic words. He also loves color: Prof. Oddfellow

I've always been fascinated with the cover font color choices magazine editors make. We've begun to index those choices in our Magazine Color Trends section, but we thought we would look at some of the most iconic covers in history. In 2005, the 40 greatest magazine covers of the last 40 years were unveiled at the 2005 American Magazine Conference (AMC) in Puerto Rico, by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) and AMC. Looking at the top 20 has shed some light on some of the most interesting color choices in the industry. Starting with number twenty, we'll take a trip back through the world of publication color.

#20 Blue (October 1997) A man diving appears on the premiere October 1997 issue of Blue. Art Director David Carson, known for his innovative typography and photography designed the cover. Editor Amy Schrier launched the first adventure lifestyle magazine, covering outdoor recreation, action sport and adventure travel for men and women. The magazine also explored the diverse cultures of the world and took a look at their political, economic and social concerns.

Called "pictures of the floating world," or Ukiyo-e, the main artistic genre of Japanese Woodblock printing first reached popularity during the second half of the 17th Century, and lasted into the 20th Century. Although initially challenged by limited colour, woodblock printing soon become a defining method of producing art. Capturing landscapes, theatre, and even more intimate scenes, Ukiyo-e captured hearts and tastes as well, as they could be inexpensively mass-produced. Traditional Japanese art usually relied on high contrast and a flattening of the dimensions in the piece.

For more on how the art is created: Diary of Carving Woodblocks

Perhaps most famously in this genre -- and still produced today -- is that of Katsushika Hokusai's work The Great Wave Off Kanagawa^(above), part off his series One-hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, wherein Mt. Fuji is but a hill in the shadow of the tsunami. The wave seemed to reach out for the people desperately clinging to boats with claws, as if the size and arc weren't enough to suggest its ferocity. This piece, though one of the more popular ones, is marked as the one that is the least Japanese in technique of his works.