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by toufiqbarhamov 2708 days ago
I’m finding this fascinating, any other good links to learn about this kind of thing?
4 comments

The other fascinating thing is light-fastness. PR83 (Alizarin Crimson) is a cool red (purple facing), and is recommended by many art teachers...

It's also objectively shit as a pigment. It is not light-fast at all, and fades after only a few months.

https://www.justpaint.org/alizarin-crimson-now-you-see-it/

Yet art teachers continue to recommend it. Nowadays most companies sell it as a 'Hue'. That is a mixture of more light-fast paints designed to emulate the original, but some companies sell 'Alizarin Crimson Genuine', which is still recommended by academics to this day.

Other fugitive colors include aureolin and chrome yellow. The later of which was used by Van Gogh and has caused his paintings to fade irreversibly.

https://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i5/Van-Goghs-Fading-Colors-I...

Alizarin Crimson is so predictably shit for lightfastness that it's (apparently) actually used to calibrate lightfastness checking.
Thanks, I’m going to read myself into a coma tonight.
> ... read myself into a coma

is this a common phrase or regular expression? American or British english?

I do this all the time, and when I start to feel like I'm going to crash, I force myself until I'm close to the next deep insight (like when you see a set of equations slowly taking a certain shape and you think "ok, I think I see where this is going") and stop reading there and then, go to sleep, and the next morning ... the very first thing I think about is finishing that train of thought... It somehow helps me remember the information better, I don't know why but uf I had to take a guess: when we expose ourself to information we aren't wondering about, our brain does not perceive it as important, while if you set up the experience as a cliffhanger, you trick your brain into pondering the unfinished train of thought, both as you try to fall asleep and the moment you wake up and realize you want to finish the train of thought... it's like you get to pick one low effort memorizable deep insight per day (you could reach more during the day, but those require higher level of effort, and don't reside in the uncertain or pondering phase long enough to subconsciously gain importance, we remember our big breakthroughs not our smaller ones, and when you know you will read the answer in a few seconds your brain exerts less effort in pondering the questionn)

I don't know about common, but it just follows the pattern of "drink oneself into a stupor".
If you are interested in color, pigments and paint from an artist's standpoint, I strongly recommend Tad Spurgeon's blog and his book "Living Craft"[1]. The book delves into not just classic and modern pigments and their combinations (palettes) for painting, but also many variants of and recipes for binders (paint == binder + pigment), most notably hand-refined linseed oil, which can apparently be made to dry much faster and be relatively more permanent than most commercial oils. Not always scientific but always thoughtful and surprising, the book is a very enjoyable reference for a hardcore paint geek.

Spurgeon reminds me of Knuth, in a dedicate-your-life-to-an-extremely-deep-inquiry sort of way. The book was an investment (I think I paid 80 US), but one I definitely haven't regretted.

[1] https://www.tadspurgeon.com/the_book.php?page=the+book

I found Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay a really fun book to read about natural colorants and their history.
Cennini's "The Craftsman's Handbook" as well as Leonardo Da Vinci's "Treatise on Painting" are pretty good books from the 1400s and 1500s.

They use oil and egg as medium instead of acrylic, but the interesting chemistry starting from a piece of rock or whatever is great to nerd out on.

I’m fully into that, thanks for the tip!