TT #33 - 13 Shades of Autumn

In keeping with tradition (see here and here), I give you, in no particular order, 13 shades of autumn (these are not colors of individual types of fall leaves, rather examples of the color palette that we tend to think of as autumnal). And yes, those of you who are regular readers of my blog will no doubt notice that I've been a wee bit obsessed with the subject of fall this week. We don't get fall colors here in Israel, but these are the types of things I'd enjoy seeing if I still lived in NY. As before, descriptions are taken from wikipedia:

1. Pumpkin - color that resembles pumpkins.

2. Vermillion - when found naturally-occurring vermillion is an opaque orangeish red pigment, used since antiquity, originally derived from the powdered mineral cinnabar. Chemically the pigment is mercuric sulfide, HgS. Like all mercury compounds it is toxic. Today, vermilion is most commonly artificially produced by reacting mercury with molten sulfur. Most naturally produced vermilion comes from cinnabar mined in China, giving rise to its alternative name of China red. As pure sources of cinnabar are rare, natural vermilion has always been extremely expensive. In the Middle Ages, vermilion was often as expensive as gilding. As of 2007 a 40 ml tube of genuine Chinese Vermilion oil paint can cost £51 (US ~$100).

There is evidence of the use of cinnabar pigment in India and China since prehistory; It was known to the Romans; Pliny the Elder records that it became so expensive that the price had to be fixed by the Roman government. The synthesis of vermilion from mercury and sulfur may have been invented by the Chinese; the earliest known description of the process dates from the 8th century. The synthetically-produced pigment was used throughout Europe from the 12th century, mostly for illuminated manuscripts, although it remained prohibitively expensive until the 14th century when the technique for synthesizing vermilion was widely known in Europe. Synthetic vermilion was regarded early on as superior to the pigment derived from natural cinnabar. Cennino Cennini mentions that vermilion is "made by alchemy, prepared in a retort. I am leaving out the system for this, because it would be too tedious to set forth in my discussion all the methods and receipts. Because, if you want to take the trouble, you will find plenty of receipts for it, and especially by asking of the friars. But I advise you rather to get some of that which you find at the druggists' for your money, so as not to lose time in the many variations of procedure. And I will teach you how to buy it, and to recognize the good vermilion. Always buy vermilion unbroken, and not pounded or ground. The reason? Because it is generally adulterated, either with red lead or with pounded brick." Vermilion was frequently adulterated due to its high price, usually with red lead, an inexpensive bright lead oxide pigment that was too reactive to be trustworthy enough for use in art.

3. Golden Yellow - Golden yellow is the color halfway between amber and yellow. It is a color that is 87.5% yellow and 12.5% red. The first recorded use of golden yellow as a color name in English was in the year 1597.

4. Burnt Sienna - an iron oxide pigment: a warm mid brown color. It is also a Crayola color.
Chemically, burnt sienna is formed by burning raw sienna (Terra di Sienna). One of the main characters of the comic strip PvP is named Brent Sienna, after the pigment and/or the color. Brent is the art director for the fictional magazine PvP. On the television show Family Guy, while trying to pick up girls in a bar, the African-American character Cleveland Brown asks "How would you like to go Black, then have to make a difficult decision regarding whether or not to go back?" To which the girl replies "I already went Burnt Sienna and never went back." She then leaves the bar with a giant talking crayon of said color. David Morrell has written a novel called Burnt Sienna. It involves a painter and retired secret agent working to rescue a beautiful woman from a madman who plans to kill her.

5. Auburn - a reddish brown color. It is similar to burgundy and maroon, although these two colors have a more reddish tint, while auburn has a slightly more brownish one. Historically, the word abram was used to mean auburn, for example in early (pre-1685) folios of Coriolanus, Thomas Kyd's Soliman and Perseda (1588) and Thomas Middleton's Blurt, Master Constable (1601). In his book 'Germania' Tacitus, the Romanised Gaulish historian, described the hair color of the Germanic peoples as being 'Rutilo' meaning Auburn in Latin.
The first recorded use of auburn as a color name in English was in 1430. Coincidentally also the color of my hair at the moment.

6. Goldenrod - a color that resembles the goldenrod plant. A crayon with this name and color, although a lighter version, was created in 1958.

7. Cerise - a deep to vivid purplish red. There are various shades of cerise. The cerise name comes from the French word meaning cherry. The word "cherry" itself comes from the Norman cherise. According to Maerz and Paul in their Dictionary of Color, the first recorded use of cerise as a color name in English was in 1858. However, it was used at least as early as 1846 in a book of crochet patterns.[

8. Orange - The colour orange occurs between red and yellow in the visible spectrum at a wavelength of about 585 – 620 nm, and has a hue of 30° in HSV colour space. The complementary colour of orange is azure, a slightly greenish blue. With pigments such as paints or inks, a mixture of the subtractive primary colours in the proportion of 75% yellow and 25% magenta produce the secondary colour orange. Orange pigments are largely in the ochre or cadmium families, and absorb mostly blue light.

9. Mahagony - a brownish color. It is approximately the color of the wood, mahogany. However, the wood itself is not uniformly the same color, and "mahogany" is not a standard HTML color with a standardized RGB value. Mahogany is an official Crayola crayon color.

10. Chestnut - Indian red also known as chestnut, is a brownish shade of rose. It is named after a special soil found in India. It is thus an earth tone as well as a red. It is composed of naturally occurring iron oxides. Indian red is not named after Native Americans. However, because of the possible confusion, Crayola changed their crayon color Indian Red to Chestnut.
11. Red - any of a number of similar colors evoked by light consisting predominantly of the longest wavelengths of light discernible by the human eye, in the wavelength range of roughly 625–750 nm. Longer wavelengths than this are called infrared, or below red and cannot be seen by human eyes. In human color psychology, red is associated with energy and blood, and emotions that stir the blood, including anger, passion, and love.
Red is used as one of the additive primary colors of light, complementary to cyan, in RGB color systems. Red is also one of the subtractive primary colors of RYB color space but not CMYK color space. One common use of red as an additive primary color is in the RGB color model. Because "red" is not by itself standardized, color mixtures based on red are not exact specifications of color either. In order to produce exact colors the color red needs to be defined in terms of an absolute color space such as sRGB. As used in computer monitors and television screens, red is very variable, but some systems may apply color correction (so that a standardized "red" is produced that is not in fact full intensity of only the red colorant).

12. Rust - a red-orange color resembling iron oxide. It is a commonly used color in stage lighting, and appears roughly the same color as photographic safelights when used over a standard tungsten light source. The color is number 777 in Lee Filters swatch book.

13. Brown - a color which is a dark yellow, orange, or red, of low luminance relative to lighter or white colored objects. Some pale orange and yellow colors of lower saturation are called light browns.

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