What Is Blue

January 13, 2020

For me: blue is baystate blue.

January 13, 2020

comment deleted. it was not relevant to the OP's question.

Edited January 13, 2020 by 5Cavaliers

January 13, 2020

Perhaps I should have been more articulated in my answer to OP. I'll try to fix that now.

For me the color of the sky is not blue. I guess this comes from my native language: italian. If I had to name the color of the sky in italian, it would not be "blu", but "azzurro" or "celeste". The sea would be "blu", but not the crystal clear water on a white sand tropical beach, rather the deep rich and saturated color of that greek island sea. For me blue is ultramarine blue, hence my preference for BSB. Other inks that are a good approximation of my idea of blue would be Diamine Sargasso Sea, Diamine Sapphire Blue, Diamine Blue Velvet. Kon peki, Edelstein Topaz, Noodler's Navajo Turquoise or North Star Liberator fall more into the azure field than blue. To be honest I have never worried whether the english azure is a good match for italian azzurro... ty OP for giving me food for thought.

P.S. I love my Edelstein Topaz and Noodler's Navajo Turquoise (which is not a turquoise to me, again: need to check definitions) just as much as I love my BSB and friends mentioned above.

January 14, 2020

Everyone sees colors a little differently, and everyone describes them even more differently. We've had disagreements here before about what is pure blue, what is sky blue, what is turquoise blue, what is violet, cobalt, royal blue, etc. What one guy says is pure blue, another calls aqua. What one guy calls purple-ish, another says is pure blue.

Computers have caused a lot of confusion, because they've made most people aware of the RGB color model — Red, Green, Blue. The problem is that the B in RGB is really violet. It should be called the RGV model. Think back to your rainbow. . . Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet. The V in Roy G Biv is the same as the B in RGB. (And to make matters even worse, even as children we were taught that "roses are red, violets are blue!" Way to spread confusion!)

Complicating things even more is that some people tend to perceive any shade of blue as being more violet-ish if it's darker, for example if you're using a wetter pen. The hue hasn't changed, but your perception of it does.

So with all those caveats stated, here are how my eyes see things:
blue = Iroshizuku Kon Peki
indigo-blue = Diamine Asa Blue
indigo = Parker Penman Sapphire, Monteverde Horizon Blue
violet = Noodler's Baystate Blue

As if any more proof were needed of the eternal wisdom expressed by tonybelding in the first part of the comment I’ve quoted, I am now going to disagree with its second paragraph...

For my eyes, the colour of the violet at the shorter-wavelength end of the rainbow is a colour that is almost reminiscent of pink in its vivid brightness! For my eyes, it is represented very accurately by Pelikan 4001 Violet.

I bought that ink because I wanted a ‘purple’, and liked the colour of the ‘puddle’ of ink inside the lid of the bottle. I was then surprised by how very pure-violet it seemed to be when coming out of a nib

To my eyes, the ‘indigo’ in a rainbow is a very dark blue, almost blue-black.

I never thought of Parker Penman Sapphire as being ‘indigo’, but then I only ever used it in Parker ‘M’ nibs - if I’d ever run it through anything as wide & as wet as say a Pelikan ‘B’ or ‘BB’ I too might have perceived its ‘dark side’.

For me, a good match to the ‘indigo’ in a rainbow might be something like Pilot Blue/Black (from a wet nib), or a bit of dark-shading writing written in Pelikan Edelstein Tanzanite. Or, based on the reviews of it I have seen on here, Diamine Indigo - but I have never used that or seen it ‘in person’, so I cannot comment on whether or not its name is accurate.

So, all that said, the only thing I have to add is that I suppose that the variability in the hues of different manufacturers’ inks of the same ‘colour’ name might in part be attributable to the different colour perceptions of the chemists who formulated them.

Oh, and, given the variation in all of our individual colour perceptions, to ask that we not even think about trying to define what green is, eh?