The Color Blue (Printable Photos Included)

It's color week here at Lifeprint! We're celebrating the launch of the new limited edition 2x3 printer colors. Learn more here >

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Let's dive into blue, the popular color that holds so much meaning around the world. It may be omnipresent both in our natural world and our man-made world, but it wasn’t always that easy to come by, nor was it as ubiquitous as it is today.

Before the Egyptian times one would have rarely encountered blue in their everyday lives. For example, there is little evidence of a blue color being mentioned at all in Greek text. Even as the English language was developed, the word for Blue appeared last. It just wasn’t that visible, noticeable, or used as widely as modern times.

History of Blue

The first pigments of blue were created and used by the ancient Egyptians near 2,200 B.C. These early shades of the color we know today were created from a mixture of Limestone, sand, and a copper-containing mineral such as azurite and lapis. Once heated to a high temperature, they formed a blue glass which was then crushed and added to other materials creating a blue-ish glaze. Thank those Egyptians for one of the most ubiquitous colors in our modern times.

As civilization progressed, blue continued to remain a rare and difficult color to produce. Even in medieval times, blue was a difficult and expensive color to create so only the incredibly wealthy would be able to access it.

In the 16th century, the Indigo Blue pigment was developed and used heavily in the dying of materials and textiles, including becoming the official color of the British Navy uniforms around the world. From that point, various blue pigments continued to be discovered up until very recently. In 2009 a professor at Oregon State University accidentally discovered a new hue of blue when developing materials for electronics. He named this color YInMn and released it for commercial use in 2016. It is now available as a Crayon, if you can believe it.

YInMn Blue

Some of our favorite photos in blue.

Need some color inspiration for your own photos? We’ve curated a list of our favorite images from photographers around the world that you can use to spark some creative color usage of your own. Feel free to download and print any of these images on your own Lifeprint Printer!

Photo by Daniel Mayovskiy on Unsplash

 

Photo by Beto Galetto on Unsplash

 

[Download The Blue Photo Collection >]

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