Jobs done, quickly and messily

Watching the interplay of liquids used to make these beautiful calligraphic letters looks like geothermal vents opening and releasing gases and lava into the air. Read the rest

Nicky James Burch demonstrates her technique for making vibrant psychedelic liquid art with basic acrylic paint. Looks like a fun kids' project! Read the rest

Ian Davenport developed a cool technique of pouring paint down surfaces, allowing paint in works like Giardini Colourfall to pool at the bottom. Here's a nice behind-the scenes in English:

Reminds me of work by Holton Rower:

• Behind-the-scenes: Ian Davenport @ HANA Building, Singapore (YouTube / Art Plural Gallery) Read the rest

The AI paint name generator (previously) has refined its preferences. Though still very bad at naming paint colors, there seems to be (to my mind) an emerging personality, one that has beliefs and, perhaps, opinions about its creators.

Pictured at the top of this post, for reference, is the human-named classic Opaque Couché.

Latest experiments reveal AI is still terrible at naming paint colors [Ars Technica] Read the rest

We can't be far off a time where we can order buckets of paint by punching in RGB color values. The big paint companies could obviously do this, but right now all they seem to offer are elaborate, bloated interfaces wrapping their own marketing-driven color schemes. And I'll grant that the paint pigment gamut might have some very weakly-covered areas, lightfastedness issues, and so on. I hope whoever eventually does this (brand suggestion: LATHEX) also creates a robust API for it and a affiliate program, so that Paint Colors Invented By Neural Network can be tested and refined against thousands of actual purchases. Read the rest

μcapsmic zooms in on the found at of spray paint caps used to paint a mural of the Star Child from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Used and naturally clogged in the most random ways possible, these spray paint caps were once indistinguishable from one another to the human eye and untouched by the human hand in the making. Now, each of them is considered to be small-scale models of the Universe that they created it. The first part showed here is a selection of six clogged spray paint caps that were used to create the stellar mural "StarChild (Genesis)".

• μcapsmic - A Vision of Cosmos (Vimeo / The Orion) Read the rest

According to this infographic citing Axalta Coating Systems, Asians like white cars at about twice the numbers of North Americans and Europeans. North Americans are more fond of red cars than the rest of the world. Read the rest

YouTuber SolarColorDust likes to coat things in thermochromic dust (the kind in mood rings and some thermometers). Here's a stormtrooper helmet. Read the rest

The lovely brown hues in Eugene Delacroix's 1830 painting above, titled "Liberty Leading the People," were actually pigments made from ground-up mummies from Egypt. From National Geographic:

The use of mummy as a pigment most likely stemmed from an even more unusual use—as medicine. From the early medieval period, Europeans were ingesting and applying preparations of mummy to cure everything from epilepsy to stomach ailments. It's unclear whether Egyptian mummies were prized for the mistaken belief that they contained bitumen (the Arabic word for the sticky organic substance, which was also believed to have medicinal value, is mumiya), or whether Europeans believed that the preserved remains contained otherworldly powers.

What is clear to researchers is that early artist pigments were derived from medicines at the time, and were commonly sold alongside them in European apothecaries. And just as mummy was waning in popularity as a medical treatment, Napoleon's invasion of Egypt at the end of the 18th century unleashed a new wave of Egyptomania across the Continent.

Tourists brought entire mummies home to display in their living rooms, and mummy unwrapping parties became popular. Despite prohibitions against their removal, boatloads of mummies—both human and animal—were brought over from Egypt to serve as fuel for steam engines and fertilizer for crops, and as art supplies.

By the beginning of the 20th century, however, the supply of quality mummies for pigment appears to have dried up. A 1904 ad in the Daily Mail requests one "at a suitable price," adding: "Surely a 2,000-year-old mummy of an Egyptian monarch may be used for adorning a noble fresco in Westminster Hall…without giving offence to the ghost of the departed gentlemen or his descendants."

"Was This Masterpiece Painted With Ground Mummy? Read the rest

I can't get enough of this gorgeous macro video of various blobs of glorious color. It's like a neverending lava lamp. Read the rest

I haven't enjoyed the effects of dry pigments this much since Blue Man Group! (Kuma Films)

Read the rest

Thomas Blanchard created this deeply trip video, "The Colors of Feelings," using paint, oil, milk, honey, and cinnamon. Read the rest

Well, you hardly even need to watch Popular Mechanics' 10-second video now, do you?

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In the eternal struggle between graffiti enthusasts and wall owners, sometimes a playful conversation emerges, like this battle over the word RED vs. red paint. Read the rest

Clinical psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair, author of The Big Disconnect, studies why it's so hard for us to disregard the digital disruptions around us. Tanya Schevitz, spokesperson for Reboot's National Day of Unplugging, talked to Steiner-Adair about our aversion to disconnecting and the power of real presence.

If you've ever spent much time in American farm country, then you've probably noticed that there's a strong tradition there of coating barns and outbuildings with red paint. Why?

Because nuclear fusion.

Okay, the actual answer is simply because red paint has long been a cheap color to buy. But, explains Google engineer Yonatan Zunger, there is some really interesting physics lurking in the background of that price point.

What makes a cheap pigment? Obviously, that it’s plentiful. The red pigment that makes cheap paint is red ochre, which is just iron and oxygen. These are incredibly plentiful: the Earth’s crust is 6% iron and 30% oxygen. Oxygen is plentiful and affects the color of compounds it’s in by shaping them, but the real color is determined by the d-electrons of whatever attaches to it: red from iron, blues and greens from copper, a beautiful deep blue from cobalt, and so on. So if we know that good pigments will all come from elements in that big d-block in the middle, the real question is, why is one of these elements, iron, so much more common than all of the others? Why isn’t our world made mostly of, say, copper, or vanadium?

The answer, again, is nuclear fusion.

You can read the full story on Zunger's Google+ page. In my experience, white is another really common barn color, due to the fact that whitewash — a paint made from calcium hydroxide and chalk (which is also calcium) — is way cheap, as well. Read the rest