When Artists Invented Their Own Colors: Strange Pigments in Art History

A painter's palette might seem simple with a collection of red, blue, yellow, green, brown, and white. However, a strange history lies beneath the familiar hues. Some pigments used were obtained from rare minerals, from insects and plants, and from chemical experiments. Some were even made from materials that wouldn't be found in any artist's studio today.

Actually, the artists were not always the creators of these pigments. Chemists, craftsmen, manufacturers, and specialist colour producers often created them. Artists experimented with new materials, added those materials to their palettes—and sometimes even shaped the artistic identity of those colors. The history of color in art is therefore a history of invention, trade, science, and experimentation.

Egyptian Blue: One of the First Manufactured Colors

Even long before the modern paint factories were developed, people were producing paints.

Egyptian blue is believed to be one of the world's earliest synthetic pigments! It might have been made as early as around 3100 BCE. The ancient Egyptian makers did not grind a naturally occurring blue mineral, but mixed silica or quartz with calcium and copper compounds and heated it to a high temperature. The resulting material, in a glass-like state, was then ground to form a pigment.

Its significance is not just for its age. Egyptian blue demonstrates that to find a specific color, artists and craftsmen experimented and evolved a material that did not simply exist in nature.

It's also had some surprising applications in modern conservation science. Ancient painters might only have used Egyptian blue to highlight certain surfaces, to create an underdrawing, or in small mixtures, rather than only as an obvious blue surface. It also has unusual infrared qualities that allow conservators to detect it using specialized imaging techniques.

Egyptian Blue

Prussian Blue: A Chemical Accident That Changed the Palette

Another major turning point came in the early eighteenth century with Prussian blue.

The pigment was developed in Berlin around 1706 and was initially produced under closely guarded conditions. Its recipe was later published, allowing production to spread. Unlike many older blue pigments, Prussian blue could be manufactured rather than relying entirely on scarce natural materials.

Its influence was international. Scientific analysis of Chinese paintings has shown that Prussian blue entered Chinese painters’ palettes from the eighteenth century onward. It was not simply a European curiosity: imported synthetic pigments became part of artistic practice in different parts of the world.

What makes Prussian blue particularly interesting is that new pigments did not necessarily eliminate older ones. Smithsonian researchers studying Pichwai paintings found that artists continued using indigo even after Prussian blue and synthetic ultramarine became available. Different pigments could provide different visual effects, giving artists more choices rather than simply replacing an old color with a new one.

Prussian Blue

Mummy Brown: A Pigment With a Disturbing Source

Few art pigments have a stranger story than mummy brown. From around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a brown pigment was produced using ground Egyptian mummies that had been embalmed with asphaltum or bitumen. Artists valued the resulting material for its transparent brown color and its usefulness in oil painting and glazes. The pigment continued to be sold into the nineteenth and even early twentieth centuries.

The story illustrates how differently artists once viewed materials. Today, the idea of grinding human remains into paint is shocking. Historically, however, the material could enter the commercial art-supply system alongside minerals, earth pigments, and other unusual substances.

Indian Yellow: A Golden Mystery

Indian yellow has an equally unusual history.

Historical accounts describe the pigment as being made from the urine of cows fed a restricted diet of mango leaves. The resulting material was processed into a brilliant golden-yellow pigment used in watercolor and tempera. According to the Getty’s Art & Architecture Thesaurus, production was prohibited in 1908, and modern counterparts are made using synthetic materials.

The history of Indian yellow is also a reminder that pigment stories should be treated carefully. Historical claims about how some pigments were produced have been debated, and conservation science continues to examine surviving samples to establish what materials were actually used. What is certain is that the name and distinctive fluorescence of authentic historical Indian yellow have made it an important subject in the scientific study of artists’ materials.

Scheele’s Green: When a Beautiful Color Was Dangerous

The nineteenth century brought another category of unusual pigments: colors created through rapidly developing chemistry.

In the 1770s, chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele developed a vivid green pigment based on arsenic compounds. It became known as Scheele’s green. Later, emerald green, another arsenic-based green, was developed as a more brilliant alternative. These pigments offered artists striking greens that could be difficult to achieve with older materials.

Their beauty came with a serious problem: arsenic toxicity. Historical painting research records the introduction and use of Scheele’s green in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, showing how quickly new synthetic colors could enter artistic practice.

The episode captures one of the central tensions in the history of color: a pigment could be technologically exciting and visually extraordinary while also carrying significant risks.

When Artists Made Color Their Own

By the twentieth century, artists were not merely choosing from an expanding commercial palette. Some began treating color itself as part of their artistic identity.

Yves Klein is a famous example. His deep blue became closely associated with his work and was known as International Klein Blue (IKB). Klein worked with a specific formulation that allowed the intense ultramarine pigment to retain its striking visual character. The color became so closely connected with his artistic practice that “Klein blue” is now widely recognized as a cultural reference.

This represents a different kind of color invention. The artist did not discover an entirely new chemical element or pigment in the way a laboratory might. Instead, he transformed a material and its application into something inseparable from an artistic concept.

A Palette Is More Than a Collection of Colors

The strange history of pigments reveals something important about art: color has never been purely visual.

Every pigment carries a story about the material world around it. Egyptian blue reflects ancient technological knowledge. Prussian blue represents the arrival of synthetic chemistry. Mummy brown reveals historical attitudes toward materials and antiquities. Indian yellow raises questions about production and animal welfare. Arsenic greens demonstrate the complicated relationship between beauty and technological progress.

Even today, conservation scientists can analyze the materials in a painting to learn about its date, origin, techniques, and sometimes whether a work could be authentic. The National Gallery of Art’s extensive research on artists’ pigments demonstrates just how much information can be contained within the tiny particles that create a painting’s color.

So the next time a painting catches your eye because of an unusual shade, look beyond the color itself. Ask where it came from, how it was made, and why the artist chose it. Sometimes the most fascinating part of a color is not what we see on the canvas, but the strange journey that brought it there. A palette is more than a collection of colors. Every pigment carries a story of experimentation, discovery, culture, and artistic expression. If color has its own story in your work, TERAVARNA’s 12th COLOR Art Competition is an opportunity to bring that story to life. Open to artists worldwide and welcoming painting, mixed media, photography, sculpture, graphic design, installation art, and other visual mediums, the competition invites artists to interpret color in their own way. Submissions are open until November 30, 2026. Let your colors speak, experiment with your palette, and share your vision with the world.