Art Blogging: A Learning Experience

Today’s Image

One of the things I like best about writing the OrbisPlanis Art Blog is that it’s a continual learning experience. I hope by being a regular viewer, you find that to be the case, too.

Here’s an example of that. One of the web tools gives search words used by the search engines (Google, Yahoo, or whatever) that link to the blog. The other day I noticed the search term “quinacidrone definition.”

Now I had seen the word quinacidrone in reading about art and painting and techniques in books and online. Turns out, quinacidrone was in one of my previous blogs. It was a color (quinacidrone burnt orange) in the palette of a watercolor artist in a book I reviewed.

OK, so I remembered it’s some kind of a color, but I certainly couldn’t tell you what it means. The word doesn’t roll right off your tongue either, you know. It sounds rather technical and something having to do with chemistry or something. In today’s blog, I’ll tell you how I finally found what it means.

So, I entered “quinacidrone” in Google search. Well, the first thing you get is a question, “do you mean quinhydrone?” I don’t think so. That was followed by links to the websites of all the paint manufacturers, such as Liquitex, Golden, Winsor & Newton, ColArt, and to sites on oil, acrylic, and gouache painting as well. There wasn’t even a link to the ubiquitous Wikipedia, and there’s always a link to that, so I’m beginning to think this has really got to be something obscure.

Surprisingly, on the second page of links was one to the OrbisPlanis. At least I had figured out how it was linked to my blog, but I still didn’t know what quinacidrone was. I then clicked on most of the manufacturers’ sites, but mostly found just a list of their paints with the word quinacidrone in the name. The other links just had the names of colors, too.

I then entered “quinacidrone definition” just as I had seen it before. Surprisingly, there were only six links, and, get this--the first link was to OrbisPlanis. The other links were similar to the first search, mostly names of colors with the word quinacidrone. There was one link about patents for European dyes that made no sense at all.

What to do. I tried entering “what is quinacidrone?” Guess what? OrbisPlanis came up first again. That’s just weird. The other links also had the names of colors, but there were also links to Wagon Train on Flickr and The Birth of Venus—don't ask, I have no idea.

I searched on “artist pigments.” Well, that opened up whole new avenues to search. There are too many to cover, but for example, one was to a pigment manufacturer Sinopia—I didn’t even know there were pigment manufacturers. Another was to Pigments Through the Ages—but when I entered “quinacidrone” on the site--nothing. But it's a very interesting site anyway; if you have the chance, check it out.

To make a long story short, I honestly can't recall how I stumbled upon the link to quinacidrone in the Britannica Online Encyclopedia with the definition. I must have entered at least 25 search strings before I finally found it.

But there was the definition of quinacidrone: a second group of pigments developed in the 20th century were the quinacidrone compounds; introduced in 1958, its crystalline forms range in color from yellowish-red to violet; the violet and red forms are classified on the Color Index as Pigment Violet 19.

I immediately added it to the Artist Factoids section of my blog so everyone could know.

In the next OrbisPlanis, I’ll tell you what I found out about quinacidrone and even more interesting, about the Color (or Colour) Index International.

Cheers!